Configuring and reviewing journal setup¶

Before starting¶

This section walks you through the journal settings page-by-page and tab-by-tab. The most important journal-level settings are configured through the links under Settings in the left sidebar in the dashboard: Journal, Website, Workflow, Distribution, Users & Roles. 

Whether your journal is already established with YDJ or you are new to the program, you should review the settings and ensure that they reflect your journal’s identity, practices, and policies as fully and as transparently as possible. YDJ recommends that you follow every item in this section in order, following up on items later if required.

Any fields not listed here may be considered optional. Items deemed by YDJ to be particularly important are highlighted in yellow. Please contact YDJ if you require a more accessible form of highlighting.

Finally, a suggestion: the DOAJ application form can be taken as guidelines for transparency. Once you’ve taken a pass at setting up your journal, you might want to have a look at the form to see if there’s anything you could add. Some of the questions are technical and might not make sense but focus on the ones that ask for transparency around editorial membership and process. Once eligible, you should consider applying for inclusion in DOAJ.

1. Journal settings¶

1.1 Masthead¶

• Journal title: it’s the single most important piece of info on the website and gets used EVERYWHERE. 
• Journal initials: these are particularly visible when OJS sends email
• Country: required 
• Publisher: optional whether you identify your academic unit or York University Library 
• URL: the publisher URL (not the journal URL) 
• Online ISSN and Print ISSN: if you don’t have one yet, you can apply for one after your first issue. If you have both online and print ISSNs, enter both. If you have had multiple ISSNs, enter the most recent; you may wish to include previous ISSNs in About the Journal (below)
• Editorial History: important for transparency’s sake. List editorial positions and board members.

• Journal Summary: less important than About the Journal (below). Can be made to appear on the homepage (see OJS homepage layout (Default template), #8) – but keep it short! 
• About the Journal: appears on the About the Journal page on the front end. YDJ advises including more information about the journal’s scope, mandate, history, and operations than not – this is also important for transparency’s sake. You may also wish to indicate the date of last update at the bottom of the blurb. 

1.2 Contact¶

• Name and Email (Principal Contact): very important. These appear on the front end.
• Name and Email (Technical Support Contact): since most technical questions must be resolved by the platform host, we advise using YDJ as a technical contact, with the name “York Digital Journals (YDJ)” and address "diginit@yorku.ca."

1.3 Sections¶

Everything published in OJS belongs to a section. Issue contents are organized by section. Some parameters controlled at the section level are: 

• Whether the contents are peer reviewed (very important for indexing) 
• Whether the contents require abstracts 
• Section-specific policies, that will be publicly displayed in the submission guidelines. 

If your journal is new to YDJ, you may not need to set these up right away but they’re very important and you should know how they work.

If your journal has already been established with YDJ, you should review each section to see if a Section Editor is assigned. When a Section Editor is designated, new submissions for that section will be assigned directly to that User, and the Journal Editors will not be notified about the new submission. 

See Learning OJS 3.3 for more about sections (although this refers to an older version of OJS, this content is still pertinent to OJS 3.5). 

1.4 Categories¶

These may not be immediately useful. Learn more at Understanding and using Categories. 

2. Website Settings¶

2.1 Appearance¶

2.1.1 Theme¶

* Colour: if you change the colour of the header, you may need to refresh the browser cache to get it to display on the front page.  * Journal Summary: the checkbox toggles whether the journal summary from the Masthead (see 1.1, above) appears on the home page. I would recommend doing this. 

2.1.2 Setup¶

• Logo and Homepage Image: the logo will be dynamically sized with the site. If you have a large or highly detailed logo, I’d recommend using the Homepage Image instead. You can use both, however.  See (see OJS homepage layout (Default template), #3 and #6) to learn more. Be sure to use alternative text to describe the images, for accessibility purposes.
• Page footer: this can be a great place to include persistent information across the whole journal site. You might want to repeat journal title, publisher info, and ISSN as well as sponsors, mottos, or land acknowledgments. 
• Sidebar: toggles which block appear in the right sidebar. Language Toggle Block is an important one if your journal is multilingual (if so, it should activate automatically). This is also where you toggle Custom Blocks (see Sidebar blocks). 

2.1.3 Editorial Masthead¶

Disregard. See Editorial History (1.1, above) for YDJ's alternative implementation.

2.1.4 Advanced¶

See Understanding the OJS homepage layout (Default Theme) and Managing your site's appearance from OJS for YDJ and PKP's Designing your journal to learn more about the options for styling your journal.

2.2 Setup¶

2.2.1 Information¶

These fields populate the Information Block under Sidebar (see 2.1.2, above). The pre-populated information here is so generic as to be useless. YDJ advises only using these fields if you’re going to populate them with meaningful, journal-specific info; otherwise, you can deactivate them in the Sidebar settings (Website settings > Appearance > Setup > Sidebar).

2.2.2 Languages¶

Website languages appear here once activated by YDJ. Contact YDJ if you need more languages activated. You can add or remove submission languages yourself on this page. 

• Website languages

  • UI: governs the languages in which the user interface (UI) of the OJS front end site and dashboard may appear. Activates the Language Toggle Block (see 2.1.2, above).
  • Forms: governs the languages in which you can enter information in the OJS settings fields (i.e, the material covered in this document).

• Submission languages

  • Submissions: governs the languages which authors can designate for their manuscripts.
  • Metadata: governs the langauges in which submission metadata (e.g. title, abstract)  may be entered.

2.2.3 Navigation¶

Very important for site interaction, but you may not need to make any changes here. See Navigation menus for information. 

2.2.4 Announcements¶

Very handy for most active journals. YDJ advises using announcements for calls for proposals and for information about editorial board changes, among others. Toggling this will add a new item called Announcements to the left sidebar of the dashboard (you may need to refresh the page), where you can create and post announcements. 

2.2.5 Highlights¶

A new feature in OJS 3.5 that allows you to highlight content on your journal homepage.

2.3 Plugins¶

You can enable/disable some plugins and change settings for some in Installed Plugins but, as a rule, you shouldn’t unless you really know what you’re doing. Contact YDJ for help with these.

The Plugin Gallery will show you what’s available to install or to upgrade, but only the Digital Publishing Librarian as admin can perform these actions. YDJ monitors plugin upgrades for all journals. 

2.4 Static Pages¶

If your journal is new to YDJ, this tab should not appear.

If your journal has already been established with YDJ, YDJ had implemented the Static Pages plugin for several, older journals. However, we now advise using Navigation menus (see 2.2.3, above) to create new pages as required.

3. Workflow Settings¶

3.1 Submission¶

3.1.1 Disable Submissions¶

You may want to toggle this if you want to prevent users from making submissions if you’re ready to accept them. 

3.1.2 Author Guidance¶

• Author Guidelines: very important. This feild appears both on the Submissions page of the front end and on the first page of the submissions workflow. Include all generic guidelines for submissions to all sections here; use the Section Policies (see 1.3, above) for section-specific guidelines.
• Submission Checklist: this list appears both on the Submissions page on the front end and on the first page of the submission process.
• Copyright Notice: EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. This is the basis of your agreement with the authors. See the documentation and help links at the beginning of the document for information about copyright and licensing. This appears during the submission, and it’s where the author agrees to the terms of copyright (e.g., they retain copyright and grant you permission to publish and archive under CC license). It should be related to but distinct from the License terms (see 4.1, below) 

3.1.3 Metadata¶

Enables you to enable or disable metadata fields for submissions. Once a field is enabled, you will have 3 options: 

• "Do not request coverage metadata from the author during submission": makes the field invisible during the submission process, and editors will add metadata to this field in the dashboard.
• "Ask the author to suggest coverage metadata during submission": makes the field optional for authors, and editors can add or edit the metadata afterward. 
• "Require the author to suggest coverage metadata before accepting their submission": makes the field required for authors, and editors can add or edit the metadata afterward. 

YDJ will enable Reference metadata so that authors can add their bibliographies (see Publish reference lists for new content). References are optional because some works (especially creative or multimedia) will not have references. However, for scholarly works that cite others, please ensure that the authors are directed to paste their bibliographies here. 

3.1.4 Components¶

The pre-populated article components may be overkill for most YDJ journals; however, the submission process directs authors to mark submissions as Article Text by default. Therefore, you can probably ignore this. 

3.2 Review¶

3.2.1 Setup¶

Review and change these settings as required. 

3.2.2 Reviewer Guidance¶

If your journal uses the peer review functionality in OJS, use the Review Guidelines to tell your peer reviewers how you’d like them to evaluate and can outline pragmata they should be aware of. If you don’t already have reviewer guidelines, you can review and adapt guidelines from other journals. 

You may also include guidelines for your reviewers to identify and disclose competing interests.

3.2.3 Review Forms¶

If your journal uses the peer review functionality in OJS, use Review Forms to create fillable forms that will be available for reviewers to complete. They work like standard web forms. 

3.3 Publisher Library¶

Use this to store files that you want to make accessible internally or externally. For example, if you want to host PDF poster of a call for submissions, you could store it here for linking from your announcement. You may also host internal policy and procedure documents for your fellow journal editors.

If your journal is new to YDJ, YDJ will store a copy of your signed hosting agreement here.

3.4 Emails¶

• Signature

  • If your journal is new to YDJ, create an email signature for the journal’s outgoing email.
  • If your journal has already been established with YDJ, review the email signature and, if necessary, edit.

Review and change other settings as required.

4. Distribution Settings¶

4.1 License¶

All fields are very important.

License terms should be similar to the Copyright Notice (see 3.1.2, above) but directed toward readers and, say, librarians who want to archive the work and instructors who may want to post copies of the article to a course site. 

4.2 DOIs¶

Do not touch. YDJ manages these settings.

4.3 Payments¶

Do not touch, unless you seriously change the way your journal operates. 

4.4 Access¶

Do not touch, unless you seriously change the way your journal operates. 

4.5 Archiving¶

YDJ recommends using Scholars Portal Journals for long-term preservation and access, which does not rely on these settings.

Your journal is welcome to make independent arrangements for you journal to use the services configured on this page. Contact YDJ complying with the requirements of these

5. Users & Roles¶

5.1 Users¶

If your journal is new to YDJ, use this section to add your co-editors and other journal staff who need access.

If your journal has already been established with YDJ, review the Users with Journal Editor and Journal Manager roles. Remove those roles from the people who shouldn't have them. Accounts with these roles can make unauthorized changes to your site and published content. 

To review user accounts according to their role, use the search box next to Current Users. Search for "Journal manager" and "Editor" (there are several types of editor role that will be returned by this search) to review the relevant user accounts.

To remove a role from a user account:

1. Click three dots to the right of the user's name to expose available options for that account.
2. Click Edit. This will open user information page.
3. Click Remove Role next to the role you wish to remove.
4. Confirm the removal.

A user account must have at least one role - you cannot remove a user's last role without adding a new one. However, you cannot add a role directly to an account (e.g., to add the Reader role so you can remove the Journal Editor role) and must instead invite them to the new Role.

If the user does not accept the invitation, you can either Disable the account or Remove it. In cases where you do not want to do this, you can contact YDJ for assistance.

5.2 Roles¶

Do not touch. 

5.3 Site Access Options¶

• User Registration: use this to toggle whether users can create their own accounts. If your journal is operational, you likely want authors and reviewers to create their own accounts.

5.4 ORCID¶

Do not touch.