Scholarly Journal Publishing

We expect journals to publish one issue or at least 4 articles within 12 months of receiving their OJS installation. Once you have your journal set up and that first peer-reviewed content published, here are some further things to consider:

• Library and Archives Canada describes the ISSN as "a unique code for identifying serial publications, such as periodicals, newspapers, annuals, journals and monographic series. It provides an efficient and economical method of communication between publishers and suppliers."
• Find the application form here.
• You must have published content and a title before applying for an ISSN.

• You want as many readers as possible to find your journal and articles.These journal setup steps help with discoverability:
  • Site discovery: Step 1.8 - Search engine indexing, Description, Keywords, Custom Tags
  • Article discovery: Step 3.4 - ensure authors index their work with good keywords
  • Metadata harvesting: Step 3.5 - the journal may register with Open Archives (OAI) among others with this step.

• Another step you can take yourself outside of OJS is to submit the site to the major search engines for indexing. 
  • Register with Google Scholar which has a specially recognized category for OJS journals.
  • You should also be sure you are included in Ulrichsweb
  • If open access, register with DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals).
  • Contact your home institution's appropriate subject librarian for further abstracting and indexing suggestions.
  • In addition, we recommend this article "Getting Found, Staying Found, Increasing Impact: Enhancing Readership and Preserving Content for OJS Journals".
  • More general information about indexing available via the OA Journals Toolkit.

• Provide your content to Library and Archives Canada
  • Library and Archives Canada's mandate is "to preserve the documentary heritage of Canada for the benefit of present and future generations." To that end, publishers are legally required to make one copy of an online journal issue available to LAC within seven days of its release. For information on how to accomplish that please refer to the links below. Complying with these regulations has benefits beyond the legal implications in that doing so increases awareness of your journal and provides yet another layer of preservation.
  • Library and Archives Canada legal deposit

• As well as ensuring your journal is indexed and searched by both major and subject-specific search engines and indexes, you will want to promote it to your target audience.
• Announce new issues on subject-specific and association listservs.
• Enable the RSS feature for the table of contents for your journal.
• Encourage your readers to register with your journal.
• Exchange ads and "Calls for Papers" with other journals in your area

• The OJS system provides native usage statistics.
• We enable Google Analytics tracking for all of our journals.

• The OJS system supports DOI (digital object identifier) persistent identifiers.
  • Publishing Services offers no cost DOI minting through Crossref (www.crossref.org) for new journals to OJS