What are OJS core feature enhancements?
The Key Exploitable Result (KER) for OJS core feature enhancements is a collection of new features developed for the journal publishing platform Open Journal Systems. The enhanced core features include implementing new solutions that allow editors to work with user and reviewer data in a GDPR-compliant way and addressing discovered shortcomings in the platform’s support for multilingual content and metadata. Additionally, the capability to interact with diverse controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, and persistent identifiers is improved, accompanied by the introduction of automated metadata checks, thus contributing to an elevated standard of metadata quality.
Open Journal Systems, developed by the Public Knowledge Project and the community around it, is the single most used journal management system. The KER will therefore have a significant impact on the Diamond Open Access publishing landscape, both in Europe and globally.
The new features will be incorporated into future releases of Open Journal Systems and will be made available for Open Monograph Press (for publishing books) and Open Preprint Systems (for publishing preprints). The functions developed will become an integral part of the software and will be maintained and further developed by the PKP community after the end of the project.
What do OJS core feature enhancements achieve?
This KER’s aims to elevate the overall metadata quality of Diamond Open Access journals and enhance the compatibility of Open Journal Systems with the European publishing landscape.
The KER will help align the platform with the region’s linguistic diversity taking into account small minority languages and will address some of the key challenges related to data privacy legislation. Small European journals will be able to produce richer and more well-formed metadata with OJS. They can make use of national and international controlled vocabularies and widely used persistent identifiers more easily.
These improvements of OJS will help many European Diamond Open Access journals and institutional publishing services to publish high-quality content adhering to professional standards. This will lead to a higher appeal of these publishing options for researchers and a higher Diamond Open Access share.