OJS Setup — Step 1: Site administration and Journal Management
This guide involves instructions for an OJS administrator to review the elements for managing their journal website, permissions, and basic details.
Edit1: This blog post has moved to a new location — Typeset Resources for OJS Setup
This is Step 1 for an administrator after the OJS software has been successfully installed on the server. In case, OJS is yet to be installed, we recommend to check out this guide to install OJS.
Quick Note: Typeset provides secure and scalable hosted OJS solutions at affordable prices. It is suited for journals that don’t want operational burden or don’t have an IT team. Read our list of top 3 OJS hosting providers here.
SITE ADMINISTRATION
Go to the login page. Enter the credentials for the admin account.
For Site Management, choose the “Administration” option from the Left Panel. In the page shown, click on the hyperlink titled “Hosted Journals”
Hosted Journals
This lists all the journals associated with your OJS installation. It is possible to include multiple journals here (it’s a good practice to limit to 5 journals per OJS installation).
In the example shown below, there is already a hosted Journal. We will go through each of the options highlighted below:
Create Journal allows you to create another new Journal within the same OJS installation. This is particularly useful for publishers that run multiple journals within a single brand.
Edit allows you to change the Journal title, the description available on the home page, the path which will be visible to readers
Remove deletes the journal from the installation. Be careful while confirming this setting as You will be asked to confirm that you really do want to do this, as it is irreversible.
Settings Wizard is an important location as it contains the administrative details for the hosted journal.
MASTHEAD
Journal Name: name of your journal. E.g. Claritas — Journal of Dialogue and culture.
Publisher is the name of the organization publishing the journal.
Journal Summary is a succinct description of your journal. In case of multiple journals, it will appear along with the listing.
Editorial Team is used to enter the team’s name, degree and brief description as a list. The data mentioned here will be visible on the public website under About > Editorial Team.
About the Journal is a description for your readers, authors, or reviewers. Use this area to mention:
- Journal’s Philosophy
- Who Can Submit?
- General Submission Rules
- Formatting Requirements
- Rights for Authors
- Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
- General Terms and Conditions of Use
Hit the Save button to save your changes.
CONTACT
Mailing Address: This appears on the “Contact” page on the website. Add your organization’s official mailing address.
Principal Contact: Usually the Editor-in-Chief. Add contact information for the journal’s main contact person.
Technical Support Contact: Your IT team contact information. (Note: Typeset provides secure and scalable hosted OJS solutions for journals that don’t have an IT team or do not have operational bandwidth. In such a case, we will provide our contact information here).
Hit the Save button to save your changes.
APPEARANCE
Logo and Page footer: Use these to bring more richness to your Journal’s website
Theme: This controls the entire look and feel of your website. (We will discuss themes in a separate blog)
The other options (color, font headings) can be kept within the default settings.
SUBMISSION
Author Guidelines and Privacy Statement: Recommended to be entered.
Submission Metadata: In case, you plan to introduce author submissions directly via OJS, the authors would be asked to enter certain details. Check the metadata that you would want authors to fill out.
INDEXING
This option is particularly important if you want your publications to be discovered on Google and Google Scholar. Adding custom tags is helpful for Google to display your results if a reader searches for that particular tag. (In Typeset’s hosted OJS solution, the indexing settings are handled by our SEO experts)
USERS
This lists all the authors and editorial staff who have access to your OJS platform. Usually, the Editorial Staff has more detailed permissions as compared to the Authors. You can view/ change the permission of any user by clicking the “Edit User” button:
Site Settings
This section will allow you to add information regarding your overall OJS installation, not individual journals.
Site Setup
The Site setup will enable you to define the structure of your main OJS website that is publicly available. You would need to enter the name of your site, an introductory statement about your site, a redirect option (if you only plan to have one journal on this installation), a description of your site, contact information, a minimum password length for registered users, and indexing registration.
Languages
Through the OJS admin interface, you can add additional languages to your site here (multilingual system), making them available to all of the journals on your installation.
Plugins
From here, you can choose to enable or disable various plugins, making them available (or not) to all of the journals on this OJS installation.
Quick Note: Typeset provides secure and scalable hosted OJS solutions at affordable prices. It is suited for journals that don’t want operational burden or don’t have an IT team.
Before you go
Appendix:
If you found the above article interesting, the following blogs might also interest you.
About Typeset
Since 2015, Typeset has enabled publishers, institutions, and universities to establish online journals using the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software.
Additionally, our platform also includes additional services for small and medium journals to streamline their production workflow and save the cost and effort.
- XML (JATS, CrossRef, PubMed, SciELO, Redalyc) generation to improve your online visibility and make you compliant with the indexing bodies.
- Generate the Final production PDF.
- Provide capacity to extract HTML, ePUb within few seconds.
- Auto-fill your DOIs and interlink them automatically in the export (PDF, XML)
