Banner graphic for Open Journal Systems (OJS)

Open Journal Systems

Manage your entire researcher-to-reader workflow for submission, peer review, and production from one place with OJS, the world’s most widely used end-to-end scholarly publishing platform.

Publish articles and issues online and have them fully indexed in global discovery services like Google Scholar, Crossref, DOAJ, and many others.
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Download

Download and install OJS on your own server.
software icon indicating code

Documentation

Our technical documentation for sysadmins, plugin developers, and theme builders.
software icon indicating guides

User Guides

Tutorials and step-by-step guides for librarians, publishers and editorial managers.
Manage your entire researcher-to-reader workflow for submission, peer review, and production from one place with OJS, the world’s most widely used end-to-end scholarly publishing platform.

Publish articles and issues online and have them fully indexed in global discovery services like Google Scholar, Crossref, DOAJ, and many others.
download icon

Download

Download and install OJS on your own server.
software icon indicating code

Documentation

Our technical documentation for sysadmins, plugin developers, and theme builders.
software icon indicating guides

User Guides

Tutorials and step-by-step guides for librarians, publishers and editorial managers.

Everything a scholarly journal needs

1
Invite authors to submit to your journal through a configurable, step-by-step submission wizard.
2
Select peer reviewers, assign due dates, and send reminders to stay on schedule.
3
Collect your articles, editorials and reviews into issues and publish them online in a mobile-friendly website.
4
Drive the dissemination and discovery of your work through Google Scholar, DOAJ, Crossref, OAI-PMH metadata harvesters, and more.

Everything a scholarly journal needs

1
Invite authors to submit to your journal through a configurable, step-by-step submission wizard.
2
Select peer reviewers, assign due dates, and send reminders to stay on schedule.
3
Collect your articles, editorials and reviews into issues and publish them online in a mobile-friendly website.
4
Drive the dissemination and discovery of your work through Google Scholar, DOAJ, Crossref, OAI-PMH metadata harvesters, and more.

Key Features

Powerful, flexible software that is built to meet the needs of journals in every country, language and discipline.
Run one or many journals
Every installation of OJS can run one or many journals, so you can decide what suits your publishing setup.
Flexible editorial workflow
Host a small editorial collective or run a streamlined publishing pipeline with editors, copyeditors and production assistants.
Your journals, your brand
Create a custom theme for your journal or publishing house. Or customize one of our responsive, off-the-shelf themes.
Rich publication metadata
Share your work in machine-readable metadata formats like Dublin Core and OAI-PMH.
Multiple languages
Born in multilingual Canada, our software supports journals publishing in one or two or as many languages as you need.
Indexing and dissemination
Quickly deposit your work with discovery services like Google Scholar, DOAJ, Crossref, DataCite and PubMed.
Long-term preservation
Ensure your journals are preserved in permanent archiving services like PKP|PN and CLOCKSS/LOCKSS.
Global scholarly infrastructure
Integrate with open industry standards such as DOIs, ORCID authentication and ROR affiliations.
Own your data
No lock-ins or walled gardens. Use import/export tools to take your data anywhere, even to a different platform.
Stay on schedule
Track every submission and find out quickly when editors and reviewers are falling behind.
Peer review
Find the right reviewers for every submission, with reviewer interests and editorial ratings, as well as accept and decline rates.
Track your success
View detailed article-by-article statistics and monitor editorial metrics like response times and reviews per submission.
Audio/video and datasets
Publish audio and video files, bespoke digital humanities projects or research datasets alongside full-text PDF, Word and HTML.
Preserve the scholarly record
Track changes to publications with versioned metadata and use the activity log to audit controversial editorial decisions.

Trusted by institutions around the world

PKP’s open source software is being used around the globe – improving the quality and access to academic research.

“With OJS we can easily host more than a hundred small journals in many languages. That has lowered the cost of publishing and helped more Finnish journals make the switch to open access.”

-Antti-Jussi Nygård, Coordinator, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies

Logo for the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies

How It Works

  • Screenshot of the submission wizard in OJS
  • Screenshot of the editorial list of submissions in OJS
  • Screenshot of the review stage of the editorial workflow in OJS
  • Screenshot of the production metadata screen in OJS
  • Screenshot of a published article in OJS
  • Screenshot of a published issue in OJS
  • Screenshot of the article statistics screen in OJS
  • Screenshot of the editorial statistics screen in OJS
  • Screenshot of the user role configuration screen in OJS
  • Screenshot of multilingual publication metadata in OJS
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  • Authors submit to your journal through an easy, step-by-step wizard. Remind them of your journal formatting guidelines and optionally collect metadata like keywords right from the start.
  • Authors can upload as many files as they need through a drag-and-drop interface and distinguish the main article text from supporting materials.
  • Editors can search and filter their submissions to track them through the submission, review, copyediting and production stages. Managing editors can assign editors and monitor each editor’s assignments.
  • Assign peer reviewers to conduct anonymous or open review, set due dates with automated reminders, and see when their responses are overdue.
  • Enter rich publication metadata such as keywords and references before it is published to discovery services like Google Scholar, DOAJ, Crossref, DataCite and PubMed.
  • Publish articles directly to a mobile-friendly website with full-text downloads in PDF, HTML and other formats. Use any one of our themes or code your own.
  • Full support for issue- and volume-based publishing, with issue sections, descriptions and cover images.
  • Get detailed usage statistics on views and downloads for every article you publish.
  • Keep tabs on the progress of your editorial team with statistics on acceptance and rejection rates, time to the first decision, and more.
  • A configurable user role system lets you adapt the system for small editorial collectives or run a streamlined publishing pipeline with editors, copyeditors and production assistants.
  • Publish in more than one language with fully multilingual publication metadata.

Used Around the World

More than 30,000 journals in 150 countries use OJS to publish research in 60+ languages, making it the most widely used scholarly publishing software in the world.
Map of the world showing number of journals per region

Choose a Look

Explore demos of our free official themes. Select a theme, choose your colors, upload a logo and you’re ready to launch. If you need more control over the look and feel of your site, our theming guide makes it easy for a developer to build a fully custom design.


Hosting & Other services

Want to focus on publishing and have the technical work of installation, hosting, troubleshooting, and upgrades taken care of? PKP offers complete hosting and support plans for OJS, OMP, and OPS, plus training, consulting, and custom development.

Get Help & Support

There’s plenty of help when you need it. Learn what’s available from PKP and our community of thousands of scholarly communications professionals.

Training

Get your whole team up and running quickly with these training resources, including how to set up a journal, best practices in publishing, and a full video course for editors.

Documentation

Comprehensive documentation on how to install and use our software, along with helpful guides on how to get indexed, keeping your software up-to-date and secure, and a whole lot more.

Community Forum

Join hundreds of editors and publishers on our Forum, where our community asks and answers questions, and shares tips on how to achieve their publishing goals.

Get Help & Support

There’s plenty of help when you need it. Learn what’s available from PKP and our community of thousands of scholarly communications professionals.

Training

Get your whole team up and running quickly with these training resources, including how to set up a journal, best practices in publishing, and a full video course for editors.

Documentation

Comprehensive documentation on how to install and use our software, along with helpful guides on how to get indexed, keeping your software up-to-date and secure, and a whole lot more.

Community Forum

Join hundreds of editors and publishers on our Forum, where our community asks and answers questions, and shares tips on how to achieve their publishing goals.

The geological timescale involved with the arrival of a mountain chain like these Rocky Mountains in BC is fitting for the idea of a timeline, or PKP's story.

The PKP Story

For  more than two decades, PKP has helped researchers, scholarly societies, and academic libraries take back control of the scholarly publishing in the service of they and their colleagues’ work.
The tree represents open source and open access.

Why Open Source

The principles and practices of open source software enable everyone to participate in open access publishing, because scholarly infrastructure should be as open as the science.