This online workshop series is designed for OJS platform managers, institutional IT teams, and journal administrators who need practical support with installing, upgrading, or configuring Open Journal Systems (OJS). Whether you’re setting up OJS for the first time, migrating content, or customizing your journal’s appearance and functionality, the sessions focus on common scenarios and real needs. Each “Meet the Experts” workshop offers step-by-step demonstrations, useful checklists, and space to ask questions—making it easier for teams without deep OJS experience to get started and maintain a reliable, modern journal platform.
All workshop recordings are available here: https://av.tib.eu/series/1968. The links to the individual recordings and the links to the corresponding slides are listed below.
Workshop #1: OJS upgrade
Date & Time: August 29, 2025, 2:00 – 3:30pm CEST (online)
Watch the recording here: https://doi.org/10.5446/71579
Presentation slides available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17120751
Presenter: Jonas Raoni Soares da Silva
Jonas joined the PKP team as a Systems Developer in 2018. Since that time, Jonas has developed, maintained, and contributed to some key services for PKP, such as the PKP Index (now retired), Beacon data, and PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN). He also contributes to the development of PKP applications and works closely with PKP Publishing Services (PKP PS) hosted clients helping them realize their development projects.
Workshop description: Practical webinar designed for systems administrators/journal managers responsible for managing Open Journal Systems (OJS). This session will guide participants step-by-step through the process of upgrading from OJS 3.x to the latest 3.5 release. Staying up-to-date with the latest version of OJS is essential for journals to take advantage of the latest features, performance improvements, and critical security updates in OJS 3.5. Participants will receive a detailed walkthrough of the technical upgrade process, a checklist of requirements to ensure a smooth transition, and the opportunity to ask questions and get expert guidance.
Workshop #2: Migrating to OJS
Date & Time: September 5, 2025, 10:00am – 11:30am CEST (online)
Watch the recording here: https://av.tib.eu/media/71656
Presentation slides available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17120786
Presenters: Antti-Jussi Nygård and Ronald Steffen
Ronald joined the Open Access and Scientific Publishing team at the University Library at Free University Berlin in 2019, after working as a research scientist for more than a decade. At FU Berlin Ronald is responsible for providing publishing services (based on OJS/OMP) in the context of FU Berlin and Berlin Universities Publishing. He is also very active in the OJS community (oa.network focus group OJS-Hosting, de-hosting-network@pkp.forum), a member of the PKP Technical Committee and involved in plugin development.
Antti-Jussi works at the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, where he manages two national publishing platforms: Journal.fi, hosting more than 150 Finnish scholarly journals on Open Journal Systems (OJS), and Edition.fi, which provides infrastructure for digital scholarly books using Open Monograph Press (OMP). His work focuses on supporting editors and learned societies, advancing open access publishing practices, and ensuring sustainable, community-driven infrastructure for Finnish scholarly communication. He has been involved with the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) since 2015 and contributes to the development of OJS and related software and is a member of the PKP Technical Committee.
Workshop description: As OJS becomes increasingly popular within the scientific community, particularly in the context of transformations to scholarly-led publishing models, journal managers and administrators frequently encounter the challenge of migrating content to OJS installations. This workshop will explore various options for importing data into OJS, provide an online demonstration, and highlight best practices and strategies for a seamless migration process. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions, discuss their specific challenges, and share insights from the perspectives of their individual journals.
Workshop #3: OJS Containerization (Docker)
Date & Time: September 12, 2025, 9:00-11:30 am CEST (online)
Watch the recording here: https://doi.org/10.5446/71656
Presentation slides available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17494852
Presenter: Marc Bria
Marc is a computer scientist with long experience in free software and technologies applied to publishing. At the UAB Publications Service, he has defined, developed and maintains the infrastructure of more than 50 academic journals.
He actively contributes to PKP, where, among other tasks, he maintains the official docker images, provides support and coordinates translations into Spanish and Catalan.
He has been a member of the Technical Committee since 2013, serving as chair until May of this year.
Workshop description: As publishing services adopt more flexible and scalable infrastructures, the containerization OJS emerges as an effective solution to simplify the installation, management, and maintenance of this publishing platform.
Using containers offers several advantages: it reduces dependency conflicts, facilitates portability, ensures consistent configurations, improves scalability, and simplifies tasks such as updates, backups, and recovery.
This workshop will combine theory and practice, providing knowledge, recipes, and best practices to highlight the benefits of managing OJS through containers. It will begin with an overview of container advantages and an introduction to the basic concepts of containerization (focused on Docker and Docker Compose), followed by a demonstration of how to deploy OJS using the available official images. After reviewing the current state and roadmap of the official containers, the session will cover key aspects such as updating OJS, managing the environment, and performing backups.
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:
- Understand the basic concepts of containerization technology
- Apply this technology to their own services and learn how to migrate to Docker
- Maintain and update their services using Docker and Docker Compose
- Build their own images
Workshop #4: Configuration options in OJS
Date & Time: September 26, 2025, 10:00-11:30 CEST (online)
Watch the recording here: https://av.tib.eu/media/71699
Presentation slides available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17251131
Presenter: Radek Gomola
Radek Gomola has been working at Masaryk University Press since 2014. He manages and customizes the university-wide journals portal journals.muni.cz (powered by Open Journal Systems, hosting over 50 journals) and the university’s open access monograph library Munispace (based on Open Monograph Press).
His work focuses on journal support, system development, custom programming, metadata management, DOI administration, and databases.
He also assists other Czech universities with their OJS/OMP implementations, regularly participates in PKP sprints, and contributes to the development and promotion of Open Access publishing and the dissemination of knowledge about OJS and OMP in the Czech Republic and beyond.
Workshop description: In this session, we’ll explore how to make the most of Open Journal Systems (OJS) by using its built-in configuration options and plugins. You’ll learn practical tips and tricks to enhance the appearance and usability of your journal, choose and customize themes to match your preferred style, and make the system truly your own. While the default settings in OJS are a solid starting point, we believe that “default is good, but customized is better.”
We’ll also discuss how different versions of OJS may behave slightly differently, but many aspects can still be tailored to fit your needs. The session will highlight recommended plugins, best practices for setting up your journal, and how to configure OJS for smooth workflow and optimal performance.
Workshop #5: Theming
Date & Time: October 17, 2025, 10:00-11:30am CEST (online)
Watch the recording here: https://doi.org/10.5446/71775
Presentation slides available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17415941
Presenter: Nate Wright
Nate is a software developer and designer. He was part of PKP’s development team for eight years, where he helped build OJS, OMP and OPS versions 3.0-3.4.
During that time, he designed and built much of the theme API and wrote the first version of the Theming Guide.
Workshop description: This two-part workshop will cover key considerations and best practices when creating a theme for OJS. The first part will show you how to get started creating a child theme to modify another theme’s HTML and CSS code. In the second part, I will share my tried and tested techniques to build maintainable, performant themes. We’ll cover good ways to load custom data, create new pages, organise your code, and use modern build tools like Vite.
I’ll assume that you are able to get OJS running in a development environment and know how to open the application’s code in an editor like Visual Studio Code.
CRAFT-OA is funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement no. 101094397. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.