Open Hosting Service | External Partners

• Website set up | We will support you at all stages of setting up your publishing initiative, including the initial configuration of your website and basic customisation of the user interface.
• Website design | We will work closely with you to create a website design that reflects your brand, including colours, logos, fonts and feel.
• Content hosting | We will work with you to ensure your content is presented in a user-friendly and accessible manner. 

• OJS & OMP | The Library uses the latest versions of Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Open Monograph Press (OMP), web-based journal and book management & publishing platforms used worldwide. Both OJS and OMP can be used either to manage the full editorial workflow, including submission and peer review, or just for publishing online. Using OJS and OMP requires minimal technical expertise and full training and guidance will be given.
• Plugins | We can enable relevant plugins where possible, including Crossref, DOAJ, PubMed, and ORCID integration. 

• General training | We will provide training on using OJS/OMP and on the publishing workflow processes.
• Workflow guidance | We are on hand to provide guidance about industry developments and good practice advice on academic publishing issues. We develop and share user guides and resources on subjects including:
  • Using OJS/OMP
  • Being a journal editor
  • Managing the publication process
  • Managing peer review
  • Publication ethics and publication malpractice
  • Creative commons licenses
  • Copyright and permissions
  • Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)
  • Copyediting and production
  • Promotion and discovery
• Experience | We have over ten years’ experience of working with this open-source software and in the publishing industry. 

• We will give any and all guidance around publishing best practices. We will also help you develop your policies, in line with industry standards. This includes policies around:
  • Peer review
  • Digital preservation
  • Open Access
  • Licensing
  • Publication ethics 

• We will provide guidance around gathering metrics, creating reports, understanding data, and presenting it in an accessible manner to non-technical people. This includes:
  • Website usage and article downloads, taken from OJS/OMP and Google Analytics.
  • For journals, top article and issue information.
  • Where applicable, citation information and usage metrics, taken from the Web of Science, Scopus, and Altmetrics. 

We will provide guidance around promoting your publishing initiative, as well as advising your users how to promote their books, journals, articles and chapters. 

• All partners are expected to remain the initial contact point for queries, fault logging etc. for all of their users, staff and students.
• Edinburgh University Library staff should only be contacted on issues that partners are unable to resolve in-house. 

• All partners are expected to source and manage their own ISSNs and ISBNs.  
• All partners are expected to source their own DOI providers and manage the allocation and payment of their own DOIs. 

• Partners are responsible for managing the editorial, marketing, production, rights, and legal processes for their publishing initiative (whether through coordinating it themselves or training their users on coordinating it). 

• We will give you workflow training on using OJS/OMP, and show you how we provide training for our users. It is then up to you to provide that training to your users as and when needed.
• There are excellent guides provided by PKP which we send to our Edinburgh Diamond users. See our Resources page.