This FAQ guide is intended for current editors, who already have experience with OJS software. If you're new to journal publishing, visit our Start a new journal page.
Each piece of information is called a Block. We use a plugin for this, called Custom Blocks Manager. To update the text go to Website → Plugins tab.
Find Custom Block Manager about halfway down the page, and click on the left-hand triangle to show you the option Manage Custom Blocks. If you select the block you want to edit, click Edit, you will get a pop-up box with the text in question.
There are 2 main ways to contact all users registered for your journal: make an Announcement or send a Bulk Email (new feature).
Announcements may be turned on or off under Website → Setup → Announcements → Checkbox toggle: Enable announcements. Once turned on, an Announcements button will appear on your Dashboard.
Depending on your journal settings, announcements may also appear on your journal homepage or dedicated Announcements page.
You have the option to send announcements to every registered user (unless they've opted out) by going to Announcements → Add Announcement → fill in details → Checkbox Send an email about this to all registered users.
Announcements are appropriate for content such as Call for Papers, recruitment for Reviewers, and other informational content.
This is a new optional feature. When this feature is enabled, a journal manager will be able to send an email to all users registered with their journal (and bypass anyone who has opted out of notifications). Misuse of this feature to send unsolicited email may violate anti-spam laws in some jurisdictions and may result in your server's emails being blocked as spam.
Before requesting this feature, we encourage you to familiarize yourself with Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation.
A few things may be causing this issue:
Make sure that the user's email address (the one attached to their current account) is the correct one, and correctly spelled. OJS does not verify email addresses, and typos happen! Users also often inadvertently create multiple accounts under different usernames.
Secondly, if the email is a notification, make sure that the user's notifications are set correctly. Users can opted out of receiving OJS notifications (including email notifications) for Discussion-related activities. The user may have done this a while ago, and forgotten. Since this setting is controlled at the individual user-level, we recommend asking the user to make these changes. While editors can technically "log in as" users to make changes, we recommend against this, as most users are unaware of this and some may be alarmed when actions are taken without their knowledge/permission.
That said, you can log in as the user to check their Notification Settings: Users & Roles → Users → Search → Log in As → Hover over username (top right corner) → View Profile → Notifications → Checkbox for each notification.
Check the spam filter: OJS emails are packaged in a way that even though emails are sent out by Queen's University, the Sender is listed as your own email address (or the journal's main contact). A small number of institutional email servers may flag this as suspicious.
That said, every institutional email server is configured differently, so ask the user to check their Spam folder. Ask the user to mark the legitimate email as "not Spam" or adding your journal's email addresses as "Safe" can help future cases.
Recently, the Delete button was hidden, because it was deemed too prominent for this irreversible task, which makes it too easy to make a mistake (with no undo option). It was also too easy to conflate the permanent "delete" with "decline," which archives a submission but retains it in the system.
That said, we understand that some submissions should be deleted because they're spam, duplicates, or tests.
In this case, Editors have to first Decline a submission (it's possible to Decline without notifying the author) and then a delete option will be available from the dashboard. If a submission is incomplete, you will have to complete all of the mandatory fields, decline it before you can delete it.
Once Deleted, a submission will no longer be counted in the editorial statics.
To index your journal in Web of Science, please see the procedure and requirements on the Clarivate website:
WOS journal inclusion criteria
To index your journal in DOAJ, please access the procedure and requirements on the DOAJ website:
DOAJ journal inclusion criteria
For more detailed instructions go to: https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/learning-ojs/
For help, contact open.scholarship.services@queensu.ca
