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.

More information

Public Knowledge Project. 

Open Journal Systems. 

PKP community software sprints. 

PKP Preservation Network. 

Publication Facts Label. 

Spotlight on: The Forest of Biologists

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 Company of Biologists is a not-for-profit publishing organisation dedicated to supporting and inspiring the biological community. The Company publishes five specialist peer-reviewed journals: Development, Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology, Disease Models & Mechanisms and Biology Open. It offers further support to the biological community by facilitating scientific meetings, hosting three community sites, providing travel grants for researchers and supporting research societies.

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

The Forest of Biologists is a project that we are very passionate about and we are thrilled it has been shortlisted for the ALPSP Impact Award 2024. It aligns with the concerns of biologists worldwide about climate change and biodiversity loss, with a clear focus on biodiversity.

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

We plant a tree for each article published in our journals and help to protect areas of ancient woodland on behalf of our peer reviewers (in partnership with the Woodland Trust). The idea was that with each publication we make one tiny contribution to improving biodiversity – and by adding up each of these tiny impacts, we can achieve something substantial in the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss. We also built a game-inspired website through which our communities could view virtual representations of their trees (and learn more about the real-life trees) and track our progress.

The seed for this idea was planted by Steven Kelly, Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford and Editor-in-Chief of Biology Open at the time. In the process of development that followed, we included internal and external stakeholders, including Directors and a group of early-career researchers who all gave valuable feedback throughout, making sure that the final product aligned with the needs of our audience. In-house, many staff have been enthusiastic contributors and as the Publisher, I have championed the project (and visited each woodland site to check on our trees). 

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation?

Like many other publishers we care deeply about the environment, and sustainability is a key consideration in many things we do. We feel we have made a significant commitment to biopositive publishing by embedding our actions into our core publishing activities and ensuring that our trees are responsibly planted with longevity in mind. In addition to the environmental impact of planting and protecting trees, we hope to make a significant contribution to counteracting biodiversity loss by creating new woodland habitats and helping to protect the unique biodiversity in ancient woodlands. We’re delighted that our initiative also has an educational element, emphasising the importance of trees and woodlands in the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss with the young people involved. We hope The Forest of Biologists provides an encouraging example of biopositive publishing that others may choose to emulate as we consider the effects of our activities on the environment. 

What are your plans for the future?

We have seen an overwhelmingly positive response to the initiative, from authors, readers, reviewers and librarians, which makes us even more excited to consider our next steps. We have already started discussions with the Woodland Trust on options for the future and, for now, we will almost certainly continue to focus on trees and woodland. But after that, we might well consider expanding into other areas or ecosystems.

About the author

Claire Moulton is the Publisher at The Company of Biologists, where she is responsible for the company’s journal and digital content strategy. 

Previously, Claire worked for Elsevier, where she was responsible for the Current Opinion and Trends journals. She has a background in molecular and developmental biology. 

More information

The Forest of Biologists.

The Company of Biologists.

Spotlight on: eLife's new publishing model

This year, the judges have selected a shortlist of four for the new ALPSP Impact Award. We also invite ALPSP members to take part in the judging process before the closing date of 31 July. Vote online. 

The finalists will be showcased in a lightning presentation session at the ALPSP Conference on 13 September, with the winners announced at the ALPSP Conference Awards Dinner on 14 September in Manchester.

In this series, we learn more about each of the finalists.

Tell us about your organization 

eLife is an independent nonprofit inspired by research funders and led by scientists. Since our inception in 2011, our mission has been to accelerate research through publishing, technology and culture reform. To support this goal in part, we review and publish preprints in the life sciences and medicine, and are committed to improving peer review to better convey the assessments made by editors and reviewers.

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

In January this year, we launched our new model of scientific publishing that ends binary accept/reject decisions after peer review and focuses instead on providing high-quality public reviews and assessments. The output is a Reviewed Preprint, a new form of journal article that presents the research findings alongside public peer reviews, an eLife assessment – which clearly communicates the strengths and weaknesses of a paper at a glance – and a response from the authors, if available. This new process has been designed to provide a more transparent, faster and fairer way to publish research.

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

In our new model, all papers that are invited for peer review go through eLife’s usual consultative review process, led by experts in the respective field/s. The authors then receive the eLife assessment, public reviews, and confidential recommendations from the reviewers on how to improve their paper and are given the chance to provide a response. When the authors are ready, the Reviewed Preprint is posted on the eLife website, alongside the eLife assessment, public reviews and their response. They also receive a fully citable DOI link, which they can use in their funding, grant and job applications. Reviewed Preprints provide certainty of outcome to authors. They are able to include a response to the assessment and reviews with the Reviewed Preprint, and are entirely in control of what to do next; whether that’s to revise and resubmit their work, or declare the Reviewed Preprint as the final Version of Record, which is then indexed by PubMed. If they choose to revise, which can be done as many times as they wish to address concerns raised by the reviewers, the revised version is published on our website with an updated assessment and reviews. When they consider their work finished, and declare a final Version of Record, this is akin to a traditional journal article and meets the requirements outlined by funding organisations and research institutes. They can also choose to submit their Reviewed Preprint to another journal if they wish to do so. Effectively, in this new process, eLife is handing power over the publishing process to authors. 

This model has been developed over the last couple of years in collaboration with all teams at eLife. We have worked closely with our board of editors and reviewers to design and implement the system, including the controlled vocabulary used in the eLife assessments. This vocabulary has been carefully crafted so that the editors’ and reviewers’ thoughts on the merits of a paper are clearly communicated in a consistent manner for the benefit of readers. Behind the scenes, our technology teams have worked to develop a new software platform for the display and hosting of Reviewed Preprints, so that they can be updated on the same webpage for each revision, with the same umbrella DOI and links back to previous versions of the work for ease of access. The model is a truly organisation-wide effort built on input from eLife’s executive staff, editorial board, early-career advisors and many other key stakeholders.

In what ways do you think it demonstrates innovation? 

The current scientific publishing system has seen very little innovation since its inception. It can be slow and frustrating for authors, with seemingly endless rounds of review, resubmission and rejections. It is also wasteful, with academics spending time on providing peer reviews and valuable insights that are lost when a paper is rejected. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for scientists to communicate their findings more quickly, leading to a significant jump in the number of papers published on preprint servers. Our approach to publishing combines the immediacy of preprints with the scrutiny of expert peer review. An eLife Reviewed Preprint can be online within just a few weeks of the authors receiving the reviews, speeding up the process for the benefit of scientists at all stages of their careers. Additionally, displaying public reviews and an eLife assessment alongside the Reviewed Preprints helps readers to assess the research based on its own merits, rather than judging the work simply on where it is published. 

What are your plans for the future?

eLife has always supported open science practices, including preprints, for increasing access to and transparency of research. Our hope is that Reviewed Preprints one day become the norm in science and that many diverse groups of authors are able to participate in and benefit from the process. To this end, we will continue to engage with the global science community, including researchers, funders, publishers and others, about the model. We hope that many other publishers will implement a flavour of the new model for themselves, bringing the benefits of Reviewed Preprints to even wider communities of authors and readers around the world.

About the author

Damian Pattinson is Executive Director at eLife. He started his publishing career at the BMJ, before joining PLOS ONE and later Research Square, where he launched the Research Square preprint server. He holds a PhD in Neuroscience from University College London.

More information

Website: https://elifesciences.org/

View all eLife Reviewed Preprints: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints

Twitter: https://twitter.com/eLife