Journal Setup and Management

How can I create a unique look for my journal, press, or server website? #

OJS 3 includes a number of free themes that you can use for your journal. You can view them on PKP’s demo site.

You can use one of the free themes as a basis for your journal and customize, which can be installed through the Plugin Gallery. Once you have enabled a theme in Settings > Website > Appearance, additional options will be available to customize colours and adjust other aspects of your journal’s appearance.

PKP has a guide to Designing Your Journal, which offers guidance on how to customize themes, create CSS files, and select images and fonts to suit your audience and content.

You can also develop your own OJS 3 theme, either from scratch or using one of the existing themes as a starting point. Please see PKP’s Theming Guide for additional information.

OJS, OMP, and OPS come with a number of built in blocks you can add to your sidebar under Website Settings > Appearance. If you want to add a custom block to your sidebar, you can use the Custom Blocks plugin. Learn how to use the Custom Blocks plugin here.

I uploaded a new image on my site. Why does the old image still appear? #

Try clearing the cache on your browser and then reload the page. The new image should appear. If this does not solve the problem, talk to your site administrator. They can check that your file permissions are set correctly or try increasing the upload_max_filesize, post_max_size, memory limit, and/or max_execution on your server.

How can I upload public files to our journal site? #

You can use the Publisher Library feature to upload and share files with your users, such as a .doc template for authors. You can optionally make them public and link to them via a public url. Please see the Learning OJS 3 user guide for further instructions.

Why are search results not complete on my site? #

Try re-indexing your site.

From the command line, navigate to your OJS/OMP/OPS root directory
Run the script: php tools/rebuildSearchIndex.php
Log into the dashboard as an Administrator
Go to Administration
Click Clear Data Caches
Now try searching again.

How can I create a site-wide search on a multi-journal installation? #

Every multi-journal site has a URL for a site-wide search at [yourdomain]/index/search. To make the search available to your readers, create a custom menu item for it under Settings > Website > Setup > Navigation.

How can I use a continuous publishing model in OJS, where articles are published as soon as they are ready? #

It is possible to do continuous publishing in OJS, where articles are published as soon as they are ready. However, you must assign an article to an issue before it can be published. Another option is to use the Forthcoming Plugin, which is explained below.

You can publish articles as they are ready by doing the following:

Create and publish an issue called “New Research” or whatever title is appropriate for your journal.
Add articles to the issue as they become available. They will immediately be published and posted on your journal homepage.
When the issue is full, remove the title and assign the issue an issue and volume number
Create a new issue called “New Research” and add new articles to it as they are ready.

Note that if you change issue names in the future and are minting DOIs through Crossref, you will need to update the metadata for your articles with Crossref.

If you have enabled the Citation Style Language plugin in your journal, this plugin should be disabled as you will have incorrect citations in the “How to Cite” block on your articles due to changing issue numbers.

See Learning OJS 3 - Production and Publication for more information.

The Forthcoming Articles Plugin is a third-party plugin that was developed by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies for OJS 3.1.2 and above. The plugin allows journals to preview single articles on their website before an entire issue is published. The article can be assigned a DOI and included in usage statistics. To download the plugin and learn more about it, visit its Github repository.

How can I start using DOIs? #

OJS, OMP, and OPS have a DOI Plugin used to generate DOIs as well as plugins for Crossref, Medra, and Datacite that create and export metadata to each of these agencies.. You will need to obtain membership from one of these agencies to use DOIs. See the DOI Plugin Guide for more information.

Why is my site not being indexed by Google Scholar? #

OJS is optimized to allow your site content to be indexed by Google Scholar. This is accomplished by providing structured metadata in the backend of every page on your site that can be read by web crawlers and by allowing you to add metatags to your site when you set it up to help your journal be discovered by search engines. However, there are some things that can interfere with Google Scholar indexing. See PKP’s guide to Google Scholar Indexing.