Author: Ángel Torres – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
The increasing necessity for spreading the scientific knowledge has motivated the development of platforms of publishing management, including OJS, DpubS, OpenConf, Digital Commons, Scholastica, ScholarOne, among others, automating a significant amount of processes as sending of manuscripts, establishment of scope and periodicity, coordination of communications, presentation of announcements, implementation of delivery dates and tracking of manuscripts through peer revision. All this, accompanied by a representative saving of resources and time for editors, authors and readers.
OJS is the software of open code for excellence for the management of scientific journals. Currently, around 8.286 use it, with approximately 3.200.000 published elements, among book chapters, reviews and scientific articles. The advantages that it has towards the other managers are:
-Standardization of the editorial management process: Regardless of the journal, keeping the same process of “step by step”, both for the submitting manuscripts as well as for the reviewing and edition of the same.
– Intuitive localization of its contents: Provided that OJS enables the customization of web aesthetics by modifying the CSV files, it is very common the information included in the interface and is clearly displayed in the same sections.
-Download and free use: OJS is a software with open code license, this means that the creators (Public Knowledge Project) accept the modification of the source code, an example of this is the scientific journal Comunicar in which it has been modified the source code combining the sections of the OJS with the intranet that provides the Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología. Additionally, the fact of being a free platform enables to reduce significantly the operational costs of scientific journals, thus, avoiding to charge readers and authors for their interaction.
-Recognition in the academic environment: Particularly OJS has created a collaborative community based on forums, where the editors, designers, reviewers, proofreaders, authors and readers are able to emit suggestions, solve technical problems and even to report or denounce fraudulent magazines that use the platform.
-Empowerment of indexing: OJS applies metadata OAI-PMH protocol. In other terms, it simplifies the process of incorporation of the papers published in international repositories. Specifically, Dialnet, the bibliographical portal of wider diffusion of Hispanic scientific literature in the social sciences, legal and human, collects and spreads the data exposed in OJS through this protocol.
The new version 3.0, updated until March 15th, 2017, is passing through the testing phase.
From the author’s experience, submitting a manuscript in OJS is extremely simple. You only need to go through the following 6 steps:
- Fill the registration data of the author who is sending the manuscript.
- Select section of the magazine, language of the sending and introducing comments to the editor, in case that you wish to highlight an specific aspect.
- Upload the manuscript.
- Introduce the metadata of the authors (name, last name, email, institution, country, short bio) and from the manuscript (title, abstract, keywords, partner organizations and references)
- Upload the supporting files such as research tools, sets of data that fulfill the terms established by the ethical review of research, sources that otherwise would not be available for the readers, and figures and tables.
- Confirm submitting.
In short, OJS as well as it proceeds with multiple advantages over other editorial managers, also stands out as a platform that is solid, advanced and easy to use for authors.
