24 Open Journal Systems

Mr. Hardik Joshi

Overview of Journals

A journal is a periodical publication in which articles/research papers relating to a particular academic domain are published. Journals are also known as academic journals or scholarly journals. Journals serve as platform to present and public research work. With the help of journals, researchers impart knowledge with one another and help in improving the knowledge base pertaining to a particular subject area. Journals can be classified as peer-reviewed or refereed and non-referred journal. In peer-reviewed journals, there is a process of reviewing the article before being published. The articles are reviewed by other experts of the same subject area who are of equal competence as compared to the author.

Many people are included in journal publication process. For instance, the author submits his article to the editor, the editor will send the article to reviewer who will review the article and give feedback. Depending on the feedback report, it will be decided whether the article will get published or not. Then there are section editors, proof-readers, language editors, etc. through whom the article will pass. It is not necessary to include each role, however, good journals always prefer to follow the process of peer-review and get the journal published.

In this section, we will study open source software that helps in automating the tasks of article submission, reviewing process and finally publishing of the article. The software is “Open Journal Systems” (OJS).

Introduction to Open Journal Systems (OJS)

Open Journal Systems is an open source software released under the GNU General Public License. It is used for hosting and managing peer-reviewed academic journals. Open Journal Systems is a product developed by the Public Knowledge Project. OJS was designed specifically for academia and researchers. OJS provides a platform to the researchers to submit their articles/manuscripts online so that it can be published in peer-reviewed journals. OJS supports journal management that includes from author submitting the article, peer-review of article, copy editing, layout editing, proof-reading, etc, to the final publication of each issue. OJS can be downloaded from the website http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs, the code is available online since it is an open source software.

Figure 1: Screen of Open Journal Systems

Figure 1 illustrates the screen of OJS. As seen in the screen, OJS lists the articles under the table of contents heading. Each journal has volume number and issue number. These numbers are associated with each periodical to indentify the journal uniquely. From figure 1, it is clear that there are functionalities to login, facilities to search journals using fields like title, author or keywords of the article. Few important features of OJS are:

OJS can be installed on departmental server and managed locally.
All the users can access OJS through browser and most of the process gets automated.
Submission and management of content is done online.
There is a special subscription module.
Provides indexing and search interface of the content.
Have in-built tools to read the content online.
Readers are provided with e-mail notifications
Well document manuals organized as per the modules

A single installation of OJS can serve multiple journals. We need not install multiple instances of OJS as per the number of required journals. The workflow of OJS and the roles of various users is given in figure 2.

Figure 2: OJS Workflow

Roles and responsibilities of users

The OJS provides facilities to create users with different roles that include Site Administrator, Journal Managers, Editors, Section Editors, Authors, Reviewers, Copyeditors, Layout Editors, Proofreaders, and Readers/Visitors.

The site administrator account is created during the installation process of OJS and is mainly responsible for the OJS installation. Site administrator can create new journals.

Each installation has many journal managers; they are responsible for setting up their journal website, managing user accounts. They also enrol editors, section editors, layout editors, copy editors, proof readers, author and reviewers.

Authors can register to the website and submit manuscripts online. Authors upload submission files and also provide metadata for indexing purpose. The author can track submission of his manuscripts, he can track the review and editorial process.

The Editor is responsible for entire review, editing and publishing process. The editor establishes policies and manages submissions to the section editors. The editor takes care of copyediting, proof-reading, language editing and getting the article published. Editor creates journal issues, TOC and schedules the submission for publication.

The Copyeditor is responsible to improve grammar and clarity.

The Section editors manage the review and editing of submissions pertaining to the sections allotted to them. Sometimes, a section editor who is assigned to manage submissions through the Review Process will also be responsible for managing the submissions that are accepted through the editing process. So the section editors also look through copyediting, production, and proofreading.

The Reviewer are requested to submit the reviews and are also able to upload attachments with review. The reviewer is assigned by Editor or section editor for each article.

The Layout Editor converts the article into versions of the submission format like in HTML, PDF, XML, etc.

The Proofreader carefully reads the article in different forms before it gets published. Readers receive a notification email with the publication of each issue. Installation of OJS

The following steps are performed to setup OJS that works with LAMP. OJS can be downloaded from the PKP website. After downloading the compressed file, following actions are taken:

Extract the OJS archive to the desired location of LAMP installation and within the documents directory.
Make the following files and directories (and their contents) writeable config.inc.php cache/t_cache cache/t_config cache/t_compile cache/_db public and cache directories
Create a directory to store uploaded files like manuscripts and further make this directory writeable.
Open a web browser to <http://example.com/path/to/ojs/> and follow the on-screen installation instructions.

Journal Setup

Once the installation completes, we must follow the below mentioned steps for proper configuration of each journal within the OJS installation. The required tasks are shown in figure 3.

Figure 3: Journal setup process

Following are few screens that are configured by the administrator. Figure 4 demonstrates the creation of a Journal and shows the fields that are to be entered. Figures 5 and 6 correspond to the user creation and roles assignment in OJS.

Figure 4: Journal Details entered by Journal Manager

Figure 5: User Management by Administrator

Figure 6: Roles to users by Administrator

OJS Support

In the open journal systems, each user is assigned role. Each role is required to be configured. The workflow also needs to be configured. Although the journal manager need not be a technical person, he is responsible to create users and configure the forms for each user. He is responsible to set policies that involve copyrights, policies for submission of articles and getting it published, schedule the journal deadlines and publish issues etc. Each of these configurations has set of screens.

Detailed courses for each user are available on the PKP website. A sample screen for the tutorial is as shown below:.

Figure 7: Course for Journal Managers

Apart from OJS courses, there are videos available demonstrating the configurations and used of OJS on youtube.com. The OJS documentation is structured in a good way and has sections for each type of user and the sample configuration screens available.

OJS Live Demo

The OJS website provides live demonstration of the software. Before installing the OJS on local system, we can experiment with different screens and interfaces using the online demo. The website provides administrator credentials to setup the demo and try hands on exercises with the sample installation. Figure 8 illustrates the Demo screen from where a learner can log in to OJS installation (hosted by PKP) and review different settings available to the users we have discussed in previous sections. We can create other users and test the facilities available to each user through this online demo.

OJS Live Demo

Overview of Open Journal Systems
Workflow in Open Journal Systems
Roles and Responsibilities in Open Journal Systems

you can view video on Open Journal Systems

Open Journal System References:

Online Tutorials on OJS : http://pkpschool.sfu.ca
Video lectures on OJS : https://www.youtube.com/user/PublicKnowledgeProj/
OJS Documentation https://pkp.sfu.ca/wiki/index.php?title=OJS_Documentation
Learning OJS3 (book): https://www.gitbook.com/book/pkp/ojs3/details