Research Guides: Journal Publishing: Platforms

Topics to Inform Your Choice of Platform

There are many choices to consider when building your journal's website. Many platforms, sometimes called content management systems (CMS), are geared specifically toward journal publishing. We recommend that you first assess your journal's workflows and processes, and then select a platform or a set of tools that will allow you to accomplish those goals (rather than selecting a platform and realizing later that important decisions have already been made for you).

Additionally, building and then maintaining your website is a significant project in and of itself. You will need to plan and allocate resources for the initial design and development of the journal's website. Once the website has launched, it will still need regular maintenance and attention. The planning process should also include ongoing maintenance of the website - no one wants their article to return a 404 error!

Here are some topics to consider that will help inform your choice of platform:

Design needs

Does your journal need a custom design? Do you have access to, or can you employ a web designer?
Look at existing journals and platforms, and articulate how your journal's website should be similar or different
How will basic information about the journal be organized and displayed? This can affect how findable your journal will be to researchers. For instance, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) recommendations indicate that certain information should be easily accessible from the homepage in order for your journal to be indexed there.
All new websites hosted by NYU must employ digital accessibility best practices, including non-HTML content hosted on the site such as PDFs and video. NYU adheres to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level AA standards. Content creators are responsible for ensuring their sites meet these standards, and the NYU Digital Accessibility Office’s documentation is particularly helpful for getting started.
What file formats will you publish the articles in? It is common for articles to be published as HTML, XML, PDF, and EPUB files, often with more than one file format provided because each format has different accessibility and preservation advantages and disadvantages. For example, although PDF file formats have advantages as static file formats that are not easily edited, they pose substantial accessibility challenges.

Functionality

Manuscript and file management: will authors and editors submit manuscripts via the website or email? What file formats will you accept?
Communication: similarly, how will editors, authors, and reviewers communicate with each other?
Peer review: What type of peer review will your journal engage in? Will you need a system that can maintain mutual anonymity or unilateral anonymity between reviewers and authors?
Customizations: any platform can display text and images, but does your journal require more specialized features, such as interactive data visualizations or executable code?
Metrics: what types of data do you need about how readers are using your site? (download count, page views, social media impressions, etc)
Payment system: if you accept payments, how will you safely do so?
Library integration: Can you enable libraries to include your journals in their collections?
For toll-access journals, can the platform enable the institutional access negotiated in your contracts with libraries? For example, can it integrate with Shibboleth for individual users to authenticate using their institutional credentials? Or can a library provide an IP whitelist for authentication?
For Open Access journals, how can you enable libraries to automatically include your journal in their catalogs? For example, will your platform enable you to meet the basic requirements to have your journal included in the Directory of Open Access Journals?
Preservation: How does your platform help you ensure access to your publication is long-term? Will it integrate with any preservation systems or plans that you are considering?

Labor

What types of skill sets are required to build the website? (front end developer, back end developer, user experience designer, etc)
Similarly, what skills sets are required for the ongoing maintenance of the site (updating plugins, adding new users, etc)
Do you need a project charter that specifies the expected work outputs and defines when the project is done?
Who is the project manager, or champion, that takes responsibility for moving the project along?
Who is paying the wages of the technical staff?

Data Engineering

Search feature: how will users navigate the site and what data is required to make this possible?
Findability and indexing: for services that do web-based indexing (e.g. Google Scholar), what metadata do they require and how does it need to be provided? For more on metadata best practices, see this guide’s Metadata page.

NYU Services

NYU provides a variety of technology services that can be used for journal publishing.

Web Publishing
NYU has an officially supported WordPress service called Web Publishing. Web Publishing provides free hosting as well as a “.nyu.edu” URL. However, Web Publishing sites can only make use of a pre-selected set of themes and plugins, which can potentially limit the site's functionality. See the Web Publishing List of Accessible Themes and the Web Publishing List of Available Plugins to verify.
Web Hosting
NYU Web Hosting is aimed at users with some previous experience building websites. It provides free and flexible hosting, a ".nyu.edu" URL, and the ability to install popular content management systems such as WordPress and Open Journals Systems (OJS).
Manifold
Manifold is an open access publishing platform, and is officially supported by NYU. It supports embedded interactive media elements in texts, and includes annotation features for readers to interact with texts publicly, privately, and in reading groups. Manifold’s journals module is included in NYU’s support services.
Faculty Digital Archive
NYU's institutional repository, the Faculty Digital Archive (FDA) can support journal publishing in multiple ways. For instance, for authors interested in self-archiving their publications (i.e. Green Open Access), the FDA is an ideal place to upload and share your work. Additionally, as a stable, long-term preservation-level repository, the FDA can be used to archive copies of articles. Finally, a journal may use the FDA as the hosting location for the version-of-record article files. In any of these arrangements, in the event that a journal stops operating, the FDA would become the primary platform for the journal’s content.

Publishing Services Platforms

For those looking for full scale publishing platforms that provide web hosting,publishing workflows, and services, below are some options, including some that are open source. Although most of these services have varying degrees of cost to use, they are all run by non-profit organizations that are actively contributing to a more equitable scholarly communications system. For more in-depth comparisons of widely used publishing platforms, see "Finding the Right Platform: A Crosswalk of Academy-Owned and Open-Source Digital Publishing Platforms," published in 2023.

PubPub
PubPub is an open-source publishing platform from the Knowledge Futures Group; any publisher may receive basic free hosting and access to their publishing tools. There is also a menu of priced PubPub services for more advanced publishing needs.
Janeway
Janeway is an open-source publishing platform developed by the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, to support the goals of the Open Library of Humanities’s open access scholarly journals. Any publisher can download and install Janeway, and there are priced options for Janeway hosting and support.
Scholastica
Scholastica offers a full range publishing services at cost
OJS
Open Journals Systems (OJS) is a popular open source content management system specifically for journal publishing. OJS works with most types of publishing workflows, although this more advanced range of functionality comes with its own learning curve.
Arpha
Arpha offers a full range of publishing services at cost.
Coko Foundation platforms
The Coko Foundation stewards and supports many open source tools and platforms designed for the various stages and workflows of journal publishing, such as manuscript submission and peer review.

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Approach

Jekyll/Ed
This option uses free and open source tools and employs the principles of minimal computing, although it requires some experience with web development to set up and maintain. This DIY option for journal publishing uses the Ed theme of the website framework Jekyll; there is robust Ed theme documentation, and the journal archipelagos serves as an example journal using these tools.
Wordpress
WordPress was originally created for publishing blogs. As such, it is well suited to be adapted for journal publishing.

Commercialized options

This guide’s primary focus is to support scholars who are interested in publishing open access journals, and as such we primarily recommend platforms and tools that were created by and for scholars, rather than platforms and tools created by for-profit publishers, some of whose practices necessitated the Open Access movement in the first place. (For more on motivations behind the Open Access movement, see the “Motivation” chapter of the book Open Access by Peter Suber.) However, there are publishing services provided by for-profit scholarly publishers, including the following: