FAQ

PKP Publishing Services provides hosting and support for OJS journals, OMP presses, and OPS preprint servers. All of our hosting plans include installation and setup, hosting, backups, security patches and bug fixes, upgrades, and email based support. Some hosting plans also include training, Crossref membership, extended DOI support, and minor customizations. See Journal Hosting, Press Hosting, and Preprint Hosting for the range of plans, prices, and a complete list of services included in each plan.

All of PKP’s software is released under an open source license and you are free to download, use and modify it at no charge, so long as you obey the rules of the license. You receive all of the features of the software whether you install and host it yourself or use our hosting service.

If you host the software yourself, you are responsible for maintaining the server environment, performing updates, applying security patches and bug fixes, and troubleshooting any issues that arise. We have documentation and a community support forum to help you with this.

For publishers who lack the resources to do this themselves, we offer a fee-based service which provides the installation and hosting of OJS, daily backups of your data, applying security patches and upgrades, and priority answering of your support questions.

Some hosting plans also include training, Crossref membership, extended DOI support, and minor customizations. See Journal Hosting, Press Hosting, and Preprint Hosting for the range of plans, prices, and a complete list of services included in each plan.

With all plans you receive access to all features of OJS, backups, upgrades, bug fixes, unlimited storage, unlimited articles and issues, and technical support. The differences between the plans are explained below.

Support and training

With the Basic plan our team will provide support for your journal and will answer questions, but you will not receive training on how to use the software. You will have access to PKP’s extensive documentation and training videos. 

In contrast, the Professional, Enterprise, and Institutional plans include up to 4 hours of initial training that are custom tailored for your editorial team and more dedicated ongoing support. The Enterprise and Institutional plans also include ongoing training as needed – for example, when you upgrade or change editorial staff.

Training is available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Japanese, and Russian.

Shared or own installation

Journals that are hosted via our Basic plan are on a shared OJS installation with other journals. Each journal’s site design, users, and configuration are completely independent, but the journals share a fixed set of plugins and themes that can be enabled to extend OJS functionality.

If you anticipate needing to install third-party plugins (such as the iThenticate Plugin), custom plugins, or custom themes, you will need to host your journal via the Professional, Enterprise, or Institutional plan, which includes a dedicated OJS install for your journal. You also need a standalone installation if you want our team to migrate your existing journal content.

If you plan to host multiple journals now or in the future, you may want to have your own installation with a Professional, Enterprise, or Institutional plan so that all journals are listed on an index page, you can implement a site-wide search or custom theme across all journals, or you can have journal managers or support staff who want to easily access and manage all journals. A dedicated server is available for an additional fee for high traffic OJS, OMP, and OPS installations.

Additional services

Similarly, if you anticipate needing support for single-sign-on integration (SSO), source code customizations, or custom development (e.g., for theme or feature development), then your journal will need to be hosted via our Enterprise or Institutional plan. The Enterprise plan also covers the cost of Crossref membership and DOI deposits, hands-on DOI configuration and management, ongoing training, DOAJ application support, and other additional services.

Institutional plan

The Institutional plan is only available to higher education institutions (such as universities and colleges) that host 3 or more journals. Institutional clients with 5 or more journals additionally receive free student journal hosting.

Information about OJS and other PKP software is available on PKP’s website and in our user guides. Video tutorials are available at PKP School and on our YouTube channel.

You can also try out our OJS demo site.  The login is “admin” and the password is “testdrive.” This installation will be regularly purged of all data, so please do not use it for anything other than making a short-term evaluation of the software.

We have no disk storage or bandwidth limits with our plans.

We have no publishing limits with our plans.

All OJS journals can the available plugins to assign DOIs and deposit to Crossref, but with PKP Publishing Services’ Enterprise plan, we pay for your Crossref membership fee and DOI deposit fees, configure the DOI and Crossref plugins, and manage your DOIs and Crossref deposits.

We can install and configure the iThenticate Plugin for you, but we do not at this time offer services related to Similarity Check and/or iThenticate due to the fees charged per submission sent to iThenticate.

We understand that some journals are concerned about plagiarism. Rather than use a plagiarism checking service – most of which have ethical issues related to data privacy – we recommend adopting a strong anti-plagiarism policy for your journal. You can read more about recommendations towards preventing plagiarism at the website for the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Additionally, you can read our document Getting Found, Staying Found, which details recommendations for strengthening your publication.

No, if you wish to use the iThenticate service as part of Crossref’s Similarity Check, you will have to be responsible for managing your journal’s Crossref membership to simplify your services into one location.

Alternatively, you can use iThenticate directly from Turnitin instead of through your Crossref account. We could cover your Crossref membership and DOI fees and install and configure the iThenticate plugin for your journal. But you would be responsible for purchasing your iThenticate membership and fees directly from Turnitin. It is worth noting that iThenticate is, by itself, more expensive per deposit than when bundled within Similarity Check via Crossref. Depending on the volume of deposits, it could be cheaper for your journal to use the first option.

Publishers of multiple OJS journals can subscribe to our Professional or Enterprise hosting plan, which will ensure that your journals are on a dedicated OJS installation. This allows you to list all journals on an index page, implement a site-wide search or custom theme across all journals, configure site-wide plugins, have all journals under the same domain, do simultaneous upgrades, and have journal managers or support staff easily access and manage all of the journals. The annual fee is per journal, but discounts are offered for 5 or more journals.

We have a special Institutional hosting plan for higher education institutions with three or more journals and free student journal hosting when you have five or more regular journals.

We offer custom hosting plans for large publishers with over 20 journals. Contact us for more information.

If you start with one hosting plan and want to change to another hosting plan later, it will be possible to move from Basic to Professional or Enterprise and to move between Professional and Enterprise. However, you cannot move from Professional or Enterprise to Basic. This is because OJS sites on a Basic plan are hosted on a shared OJS installation while OJS sites on a Professional and Enterprise plan are on a standalone installation, and content cannot be migrated easily between shared and standalone installations.

If you cancel hosting with us, we will provide you with full backups of your hosted installation, including database, system files, and submission files. These files could be used to migrate your content to a self-hosted installation or another service provider.

If your journal ceases operation, you could move to an Archive hosting plan, which allows you to continue making your journal available online and perhaps resume publishing in the future for $425 USD per year.

Or you can archive your journal with the PKP Preservation Network. This makes your published scholarly content available to the wider public and preserved in perpetuity. This service does not provide an archive for your review or editorial history; you would not be able to recreate your journal immediately from this archive in the event that the journal becomes active again.

PKP is a non-profit organization that provides free and open source software to publishers and promotes open access. All income generated through PKP Publishing Services is invested back into open source software development. We provide discounts to publishers that host 5+, 10+, and 20+ journals. We also offer Crossref membership sponsorship to journals in eligible low income countries. However, we are not able to offer discounts on our hosting services for low income publishers. Many academic institutions, academic libraries, and library consortia offer free or low-cost journal hosting and may be available if your journal is affiliated with an institution.

We accept most forms of payment, including Paypal, bank transfers, credit cards, and cheques.  If you have special payment needs or requests, please let us know and we will try to accommodate them.

While PKP Publishing Services does not provide production or editorial services, our affiliate partner, Open Academia, provides complete production and publication services for OJS journals that include processing manuscripts through copyediting, typesetting, proofreading, online publication, indexing, and archiving. These can be provided as add-ons to our hosting service or as part of a hosting package offered by Open Academia. Please feel free to contact them directly if you are interested in any of their services.

OJS is optimized to allow your journal content to be indexed by open indexes such as 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.

OJS provides an OAI-PMH interface for your content, which is used by many indexes to harvest metadata. PKP Publishing Services also works directly with Google Scholar to ensure that the journals we host are indexed.

In terms of indexes that require an application for inclusion, we assist journals that use our Enterprise plan with applying to DOAJ and we have a guide on applying to popular indexes such as PubMed and DOAJ. OJS has a variety of different plugins that allow you to export your journal metadata in various formats, including OAI, METS, PubMed, and indexes such as DOAJ.

Additional guidance on getting indexed and improving discoverability is available in Getting Found, Staying Found, Increasing Impact.

We provide a few options for testing our software:

• OJS live demo – data is reset on a nightly basis; other testers will have access to it;
• OMP live demo – data is reset on a nightly basis; other testers will have access to it;
• OPS live demo – data is reset on a nightly basis; other testers will have access to it;
• PKP School – while taking the video tutorials on how to use OJS, participants have the opportunity to create their own OJS installation that they can use for as long as they want;
• OJS/OMP/OPS hosting – enter into a one-year short-term hosted support agreement with PKP Publishing Services.

Once you have submitted your hosting support agreement and paid the invoice for your annual hosting fee, and we have the necessary journal information to begin, it will take approximately 2-3 business days to set up your journal or press.

Yes, you can use your own domain with any of our hosting plans. You just need to purchase the domain and then tell us what it is when we set up your journal. A domain is required for all hosting plans. A temporary subdomain ([yourjournalabbreviation]/journals.publicknowledgeproject.org) is available for journals that need it while setting up their journal.

PKP Publishing Services provides onsite backups for all hosted clients with daily, weekly, and monthly data restore points as well as offsite server duplication for disaster recovery. All of our journals are hosted in a commercial-level hosting environment by an internet service provider based in Canada, with 24×7 in-person monitoring. Additional server options may be available, including standalone servers.

OJS, OMP, and OPS can be configured to be GDPR compliant and we produced a guide on GDPR and PKP software. If you host your journal or press with us we can ensure that these recommendations are followed.

PKP Publishing Services’ policy on data and privacy can be found here.

In addition to applying security patches to all hosted journals immediately upon their release, PKP Publishing Services works directly with Carbon60, a Vancouver-based hosting provider, to ensure that our server environment is secure. Carbon60 conducts regular SOC 2 Type 2 security audits, maintains on-site 24×7 server monitoring, and restricts access to all servers with biometric validation.

These security measures are supplemented by secure workflows employed by both Carbon60 and PKP Publishing Services staff. For example, PKP|PS only transports and stores backups in encrypted form (eg. SSH/SFTP for transfer; disc encryption for local storage, if ever required).

Compared to other popular web applications, OJS has a good security track record. The PKP development team conducts regular code reviews for security implications as part of their day-to-day development cycle. If you require it, PKP|PS can provide a completed HECVAT Lite document for your review.

Yes, you can use all of the backend submission workflow management tools without publishing your content with OJS or OMP. However, it will mean you miss out on some of the software’s key features, such as easy discoverability of your metadata by Google Scholar and other indexing services and integrations with external services such as Crossref, ORCID, reference management tools, and Paperbuzz. More information on using OJS for the submission workflow only is available in our Journal Policies and Workflows guide.

OJS 3 includes a number of free themes that you can use for your journal. You can review available themes via our OJS 3 demo install. More limited themes are available for OMP and OPS.

You can use one of the free themes as a basis for your journal or press and further customize it via a stylesheet that you can upload via your website settings. This will allow you to override theme colours, fonts, etcetera, with options defined via custom CSS rules.

PKP has a guide for Designing Your Journal, which offers advice 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 theme, either from the ground-up or using one of the existing themes as a starting point. Please see our Theming Guide for additional information.

All of PKP Publishing Services’ hosting plans include freely available themes that you can use for your site. If you require assistance with minor customizations to an existing theme, our staff will be able to make the necessary changes for you at no additional cost if you subscribe to our Enterprise plan.

If you require assistance with major theme customization, our team can either assist you via a custom development contract or recommend a developer that may be able to work with you to develop your custom theme.

You may also wish to take advantage of the website design services offered by Open Academia. These additional costs are not included in your annual hosting fee. Specifications, budget, and timeline would need to be determined in advance of undertaking the work.

OJS has plugins that allow single sign-on and user authentication through an external site, including Subscription SSO, Shibboleth, OpenID, Keycloak OpenID Connect, ORCID OpenID Connect, Google OpenID Connect, Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Apple ID. They allow users to sign in once to another site and automatically get signed in to OJS. Journals hosted by PKP Publishing Services can use these plugins if they have an Enterprise plan, due to the extra system maintenance involved in operating the plugins.