Open Journal Systems: A Look at Impact and Increased Visibility

Open Journal Systems (OJS) is an open-source publishing software for the management of open access peer-reviewed academic journals, created and developed by the Public Knowledge Project. There are over 34,000 journals hosted in OJS around the world, including 75 journals hosted through the Texas Digital Library (TDL) OJS hosting service at member institutions. This presentation aims to show the relationship between TDL hosted OJS journals and their visibility to users. It will include current statistics on TDL hosted journals such as institutional information, scope of work, types of submissions, author location, and total submissions within the journal lifetime and recently (the past three years). This data will be compared to information about use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) and broadness of indexing in order to show the impact of the journals relative to their institution and the other institutions included in TDL. The presentation will also include a comparison between available global OJS data and local TDL hosted OJS journals. We will conclude by discussing strategies and tools to increase the impact of journals hosted through TDL and OJS such as search engine optimization, expanded use of PIDs, and gaining an understanding of journal impact factors.