Is customized OJS theme a good option? | A brief overview

OJS – Open Journal System offers a great deal to authors, editors, reviewers, and publishers. This end-to-end open-source software helps in editing, publishing, management of the Journal’s content. Developed in 2001 by PKP, the software has impacted the efficiency of Journal management and streamlined the overall editorial workflow for academic journals. Intending to extend the research access to the maximum number of people, OJS is the most favorite of all the Open Access Journals. There are several benefits of using an OJS for your Journal. Besides, it has brought to its users a range of themes to standardize the user experience. Moreover, with a compatible partner, you can even get a customized OJS theme. Furthermore, powered by its popularity among the educational institutes, OJS development offers the following benefits.

• Using OJS is the best and easiest way to improve leadership and visibility as it supports JATS XML standardization.

• It offers handy export options so that the readers may export the articles to the third parties, referencing systems including DOAJ, ORCID, CrossRef, PubMed, and others.

• It facilitates a secure environment for archiving and stewardship of the content.

• The latest OJS 3. x allows you a dynamic and flexible workflow that is customizable.

• Above all, it is well-optimized for the most popular search engines, including Google, Google Scholar, Bing, etc.

• OJS focuses on workflow and functionality and offers a theme-based, responsive interface for a pleasant user experience.

OJS workflow

Let's discuss its workflow a bit before getting on to the user interface and the options to get customized OJS theme. OJS development organizes the whole process of journal publishing into four discrete steps mentioned as below:

Submission: here, the Journal receives the new article submissions, and the section editors review, edit and forward them to the review. Notably, if an article fails to pass the scales of a section editor, it won’t be passed any further.

Review: At this stage, the article is reviewed by peers, who also suggest revisions to the author. After the approval, the article passes on to the next step of copyediting.

Copyediting: At this stage, the copyeditor reviews the article for grammar, rectify, and polishes the article.

Production: finally, the articles convert into the galleys such as HTML, PDFs, and XML.

OJS theme

Along with the OJS benefits, as mentioned earlier, it also offers a collection of themes for you to facilitate your readers. The OJS library for the themes includes themes such which may be custom, classic, and modern. A defined theme for a website is vital to user experience and website traffic. Therefore, you can select an OJS template theme easily and enjoy the responsive designs.

However, if you aim to stand out as a mark in the literary society, you can also try hiring an agency for a customized OJS theme. There are several digital marketing agencies out there offering top-notch OJS theme customization services.

Theme customization

When OJS is the sole king of open access journals, the only and workable way to stand out among the other journals is to customize their theme. However, attributed to the progressing development by OJS, it is much easier now.

OJS implies the modular architecture for themes. Furthermore, it utilizes the parent-child template mechanism, which facilitates the users in upgrading their theme easier in the future. Hence, OJS maintains its reputation as being the most reliable and flexible open-source journal management software. Furthermore, you can contact a third party that deals with your theme's web design and OJS theme customization. With a reputed agency, one can not only get the best OJS theme, but he can also opt to integrate some essential features. Customization of themes for OJS used to be quite a task in the years before.

On the other hand, OJScloud offers a great variety of custom-designed or pre-designed OJS themes with the OJS cloud. So, mainly you have a choice; either you can get a customized OJS theme design for your Journal and the ready-made OJS theme.

Ready-Made theme

Customers using OJS hosting can enjoy the OJS collection of ready-made themes exclusively without a penny. Any theme for this pool created by OJS can be your best pick. Although no doubt, they don’t offer much variety and innovation, they have their peculiarities. These themes are always safer for the implementation at first and make the best choice concerning the budget and price. You may not wish to take any chances right at the beginning of your journey because the customized OJS theme would need some special attention to integrate successfully. However, it is also a chance that you may not find a theme just right for your Journal. Well, this won’t be an issue as well. Such a problem can be easily solved with customization. Undoubtedly, the system's popularity has been surging, and it would get hard to get innovative with the same themes library.

Custom designed themes

Just as mentioned above, OJS has been easy for theme integration lately. Moreover, it is quite easy to find someone who can design the custom theme for you. It plays a significant role to maintain your brand identity. Hence, you can easily achieve a unique spot among the crowded scholar content space on the internet, perfect to tag a brand along with it. They serve you with creativity and innovation, but they are efficient in their performance, lightweight, and well-responsive in mobiles. If you have decided to go for customized OJS theme, you will also enjoy the technical advantages over ready-made OJS themes. You can enhance your SEO friendliness right from scratch, which is way good for the search engines.

Furthermore, having your theme customized from a reputable OJS theme customization agency such as Navicosoft would serve you with a sense of satisfaction concerning the stability, security breaches, bugs. On top of all, a custom OJS theme proves to be more efficient in performance than a ready-made one. Most probably, ready-made templates are poorly tested and may cause some serious issues in the future.

Lastly, whether you choose the ready-made or customized OJS theme, you must ensure its compatibility with your journal philosophy.