ALPSP blog: at the heart of scholarly publishing: Spotlight on: Open Journal Systems (OJS)

The judges have selected a shortlist of three for the ALPSP Impact Award 2024. This year's awards are sponsored by PA EDitorial.

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning session at the ALPSP Conference on 11 September. The winners will be announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 12 September in Manchester.

In this series, we hear from each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization

The Public Knowledge Project is a faculty-led research and development initiative at Simon Fraser University and Stanford University. Founded in 1998 with the intent of opening access to knowledge, PKP facilitates public and researcher access to its free and open source software, as well as supporting it with open education resources and conducting scholarly communication research. Its team of developers, researchers, and community support personnel are funded through research grants, library membership, and by providing hosting services for its software.

What is the project/product that you submitted for the Awards?

Open Journal Systems (OJS) is an open source journal management and publishing platform developed by the Public Knowledge Project that has grown over the last twenty years into the world’s most widely used platform with over 44,000 journals deploying it around the world, with the software available in roughly 30 languages (provided by the user community), with many of the journals bilingual, while publishing research in 60 languages. In terms of impact, OJS has enabled global participation in the digital publication of peer-reviewed research and has given rise to the Diamond Open Access model (with no fees for authors or readers).

Tell us a little about how it works and the team behind it

As an open source platform, users freely download and install OJS locally on their web servers, where it can generate any number of journals, each of which offers a setup wizard for organizing and filling out the journal, workflow, and website, with a choice of languages and other features. OJS can then serve to receive submissions, manage their peer review through multiple rounds as needed, and then see through their copyediting and production. Issues can be assembled and published on OJS where they are then indexed in Google Scholar and other services, as well as being preserved in the PKP Preservation Network. The team behind OJS is globally distributed and divided among developers, community support personnel, and researchers, with the institutional support of Simon Fraser University. The larger community of OJS users provides software translations, participates in software sprints, and develops open source plugins for special features that are shared by all.

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation?

OJS demonstrates innovation by providing the academic community with an open source infrastructure that combines editorial management with a publishing platform, enabling community translations of the software, using a plugin architecture that enables community users to develop additional features for the benefit of all, as well as a template structure that makes for easier innovation in journal design and layout. Financing the continuous development of this software over the last two decades has meant a creative combination of research grants with library OJS-user memberships, while providing some hosting support to a very small proportion of those employing the software.

What are your plans for the future?

In terms of what lies ahead for OJS, we’re refreshing the default journal design to give the journals a more effective and stylish reading environment for scholarly publishing; exploring ways of automating the markup of authors’ submission for the ready production of JATS XML, HTML and PDF versions for purposes of reviewing, editing, and publishing; improving the editorial workflow for more efficient handling of submissions; collaborating with Stanford University Press to bring Diamond Open Access to university presses as a viable alternative for scholarly societies and other journals; and introducing a Publication Facts Label for use with every article as a means of addressing research integrity and educating the public about scholarly publishing standards.

About the author

John Willinsky is professor at Simon Fraser University and Khosla Family Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, as well as founder of the Public Knowledge Project.