Open Journal Systems (OJS) is free and open source software for managing the entire researcher-to-reader workflow for submission, peer review and production of scholarly journals. It is the most widely used scholarly publishing platform in EIFL partner countries and worldwide.

In 2025 EIFL organized a series of 10 webinars on OJS best practices and use cases that were attended by over 1,000 open access journal editors, librarians and publishers. Recordings and slides for the webinars are available through our website, as EIFL Resources. 

Best practice tips were provided for a wide range of topics and issues: 

• Multilingualism in OJS (see recordings and slides from the first and the eighth webinars); 
• Making sense of journal statistics;
• Clear journal information and policies, and good metadata that help journals get indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ);
• Updating copyright information and metadata;
• Configuring the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network and Reviewer Credits, iThenticate, Crossref and Matomo plugins;
• Ensuring a complete ISSN Agency record through OJS, and  
• Adopting open science practices. 

More technical tips cover managing OJS through containers, migrating content from other websites to OJS, enabling the Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and using the free JATS XML Converter Service, 

Ethiopian Journals Online, Khulisa Journals in South Africa, journals from Lithuania, Masaryk University Press in the Czech Republic, University of Johannesburg Press in South Africa, University of Ljubljana Press in Slovenia, University of Minho in Portugal and University of Zambia shared their institutional and national OJS implementation examples.

You can also see all our OJS-related webinar recordings on the EIFL YouTube channel. 

We would like to thank all our speakers: Marc Bria Ramírez (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Júlia Castán García (University of Barcelona), Martina Dvořáková (Masaryk University Press), Radek Gomola (Masaryk University Press), Vincas Grigas (Vilnius University Press and Association of Lithuanian Serials), Getnet Lemma (Addis Ababa University Libraries), Mariya Maistrovskaya (PKP Publishing Services), Vaso Manojlović (University of Belgrade), Carla Marques (University of Minho), Dominic Mitchell (DOAJ), Marta Morgado (University of Minho), Ljiljana Jertec Musap (University of Zagreb University Computing Centre), Karl Magnus Nilsen (Septentrio Academic Publishing), Lighton Phiri (University of Zambia), Pedro Principe (University of Minho), Matevž Rudolf (University of Ljubljana Press), Ina Smith (Academy of Science of South Africa), Friedrich Summann (CORE) and Wikus van Zyl (University of Johannesburg Press). 

Early in 2026 we will be releasing an updated version of the EIFL Checklist of Good Practices in Using OJS for Journal Editing and Publishing. Watch our website for news or follow us on social media - Facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky - for alerts about the release. Here meanwhile, is a link to Version 3.