EIFL has launched a series of webinars that share firsthand experiences, use cases and practical examples of using Open Journal Systems (OJS)  free and open source software for managing and publishing scholarly journals. 

Developed by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), OJS has become the most widely-used software for publishing scholarly journals. Recently, there have been many new technical developments that improve the efficiency, speed and responsiveness of OJS, and EIFL has received numerous requests from our partner countries for training. This series of EIFL webinars, designed and organized by the EIFL Open Access Programme, aims to meet these needs and improve experiences of using OJS. 

The webinars have been extremely popular, attracting hundreds of participants. 

In the webinars, journal managers and editors share their experiences of using OJS to manage and publish scholarly journals, illustrating their input with use cases, and discussing challenges and solutions. The presenters give advice, share tips for improving journal quality and visibility and recommend tools for enhancing OJS user experiences. Time is allocated for questions and answers. 

To date, we have completed four webinars. The fifth is scheduled for 28 May, and there are further webinars in the pipeline - watch our website or follow us on social media (Facebook, X, LinkedIn) for details. 

If you missed any of the first four webinars - or want a recap - we have published the recordings and slides - 

Webinar 1 - Discusses multilingualism within OJS, sharing use cases from Norway; shares Serbian experiences of using OJS for publishing individual journals and conference proceedings, demonstrates enabling OAI-PMH in OJS. 

Webinar 2 - Shares examples from Zambia of using OJS for journal management and presents a free tool created in Croatia for converting journal content to JATS XML for scholarly publishing. 

Webinar 3 - Discusses the use of OJS by the Khulisa Journals platform in South Africa and the adoption of professional scholarly journal publishing software in Lithuania. 

Webinar 4 (organized in collaboration with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and PKP) - Explains how clear journal information and policies help journals get indexed in DOAJ , why good metadata matters, and how to use OJS for DOAJ indexing and content delivery. 

​​If you would like to present your experiences with OJS, please get in touch with oa@eifl.net.

Thank you to our webinar speakers and facilitators: Vincas Grigas (Assoc. Prof., Faculty of Communication, Vilnius University, Head of Scholarly Journals, Vilnius University Press, President, Association of Lithuanian Serials), Mariya Maistrovskaya (PKP Publishing Services), Vaso Manojlović (Assoc. Prof. and Journal Manager, University of Belgrade), Dominic Mitchell (Deputy Director, Platform Manager, DOAJ), Ljiljana Jertec Musap (University of Zagreb University Computing Centre), Karl Magnus Nilsen (senior platform engineer of the Norwegian Septentrio Academic Publishing platform), Lighton Phiri (DataLab Research Group at The University of Zambia), Milica Ševkušić (EIFL Open Access Programme), Ina Smith (Planning Manager Scholarly Publishing Programme, Academy of Science of South Africa) and Friedrich Summann (CORE Operations Manager).