Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research.
OJS assists with every stage of the refereed publishing process, from submissions through to online publication and indexing. Through its management systems, its finely grained indexing of research, and the context it provides for research, OJS seeks to improve both the scholarly and public quality of refereed research. OJS is open source software made freely available to journals worldwide for the purpose of making open access publishing a viable option for more journals, as open access can increase a journal’s readership as well as its contribution to the public good on a global scale (see PKP Publications).
The software has a ‘plugin’ architecture, similar to other community-based projects such as WordPress, allowing new features to be easily integrated without the need to change the entire core code base.
OJS have been able to identify 8,286 journals using OJS for the management and/or publishing of their content for 2014, a very impressive figure when placed in the context of some of the world’s largest commercial providers of journals who typically have between two and three thousand journals in their portfolio.