Open Journal Systems (OJS) is the journal management and publishing platform maintained by the Library's Journal Hosting Service.
OJS supports all aspects of the publication editorial workflow, including submissions, peer review, editing, online publication, indexing and exposure.
See PKP School for tutorials on how to use OJS.
Congratulations! You’ve got the "keys" to your brand new OJS site, and you are one step closer to opening up your journal to accept submissions. At this stage, your journal is set up to be only visible to registered users so you can control who sees it while you get set up. This section of the guide will guide you through some of the common activities new journals do at this stage.
This page assumes that you will allow users to self-register as Roles of: reader, author, and/or reviewer, and that you will be using OJS to accept submission and to manage your review workflow. If you prefer to not use these features, email us at open.scholarship.services@queensu.ca to discuss your new publication and we can help you configure the workflows differently.
To learn the OJS system, we recommend the following resources:
Video tutorials covering each aspect of the editorial workflow in OJS
One of the first things you will do after getting your OJS site is to add your editorial team as users and assign them the appropriate OJS role.
Journal managers & editors have access to all the editorial workflows and most of the settings, including assigning articles to editors
Layout editors & Copyeditors can only see certain stages of the process for articles to which they’ve been assigned
Guest editors & Section editors can see all stages of the process, but only for articles to which they've been assigned
Reviewers can only see the review stage of articles to which they’ve been assigned; reviewers can also decline assignments
Authors can only see their own papers at certain stages, depending on the settings configured for the anonymity of the review
Users can have multiple roles. To assign someone to a particular task (e.g. review) they’ll need to be assigned that role in the system. These roles are predetermined in OJS; changing them could lead to confusion about user privileges. We strongly recommend you keep them as-is. You can learn more about users and roles in the PKP Documentation.
The OJS software has a number of settings we suggest you review before going live. During our setup, we’ve entered in as much information as we had from your original journal proposal. We have also populated some text with default OJS information or recommended policies.