OJS Hosting — Pricing and best options available

Are you running OJS to host your journal? Or planning to start a new one? Here are the best options available in the market.

5 min readSep 26, 2020

Edit1: An updated version of the blog can be found here: Typeset Resources for OJS hosting

OJS is considered as the preferred choice for Journal Management and hosting within the Academic Publishing market. It is free, open-source, and easy to install (If you are about to start, check out our OJS Installation blog).

It’s usually the defacto standard for journals with a small Editorial team.

If you are reading this blog, it’s likely that your requirements fall in one of the categories below:

You are new to OJS software. It would be preferable to hand the software management to a 3rd party so that you can focus on publishing and journal operations.
You don’t want the operational burden of managing the OJS server that can guarantee a 100% uptime, backups, upgrades, and troubleshooting.
You want to avoid the cost (& effort) of hiring an IT team internally for this software.

These are the usual suspects. There might be other reasons that cause you to decide on OJS hosting.

In this blog post, I’ll list the top two solutions for OJS hosting that are available in the market today. While the actual hosting providers are more than 100, we don’t want to confuse you. We will pick those that have an extensive user base, are considered a brand, and provide you with customizations.

Feature Comparison

This is a summary of top providers. Details follow below the comparison chart.

Typeset OJS Hosting Suite

You can book a demo for the OJS hosting here. They usually get back to you within 2–3 hours.

Typeset provides an end-to-end publishing stack for small and medium journals. OJS hosting is part of this stack. We will go through their set of features below:

Price
The price offered is competitive. If you are a publisher with up to 5 journals, your requirements should be met with a single OJS instance. Typeset’s starting range is 299$/year (i.e. 25$/month, billed yearly) that can support up to 5 journals.
JATS XML support

JATS XML is a key differentiator as compared to the other 2 providers. Typeset offers JATS XML conversion at an additional cost for its clients. JATS XML is essential for publishers who are looking to build an online presence and improve their visibility on Google and Google Scholar.

Apart from that, this solution also offers PubMed XML, CrossRef XML, SciELO XML, Redalyc XML, HTML, ePUB. Journals also use the service for generating final typesetted PDF output.

Unlimited Articles, Storages and Standalone server
Publishers do not want to have set bounds on the capacity of their respective journals. Typeset agrees with the philosophy, and provides unlimited capacity on each journal level.
Backups & Security
Your data is regularly backed up on the AWS cloud, backed by the RDS infrastucture. Data is hosted in secure SSAE 16 / SOC1 certified data centers of AWS. In addition, firewalls are implemented to prevent unauthorized access. Regular snapshots of database is taken by Typeset’s IT team and moved securely to separate datacenter for backup for disaster management.
Email integration with Sendgrid
Sendgrid is the leading player for email delivery for both transactional and marketing emails. As part of your OJS hosting suite, an Editorial admin would be regularly required to email authors & reviewers.
Typeset integrates with Sendgrid to provide a balanced, scalable email infrastructure service that guarantees email deliverability. No hassles for you.
Dedicated Account managers & Webinars
To perform basic operations in the OJS admin interface, Typeset organizes regular webinars with Chief Editors and Editorial Staff. This is to onboard the Editorial team to familiarize with the platform.
A dedicated account manager is also assigned for a 24 X 7 Support.
Custom Themes
This is an add-on functionality. Typeset provides exposure to custom themes that could make your website be more visually attractive. Typeset also provides themes that are compatible with mobile reading.

To get access to Typeset’s OJS service, you can book a demo at this link.

PKP hosting

PKP stands for Public Knowledge Project. It is a non-profit research initiative focusing on making public funded research more openly accessible. They are the original creators of the OJS software. Their team maintains the software release cycle of the OJS software. Due to their efforts, a strong user community has developed around the software. This is their community discussion forum.

PKP provides OJS hosting and support as a service. Here is a summary of their features:

Price
The price point is on a slightly higher side, starting from $850/year/journal. An important caveat is that their pricing modal is per journal. This means that if you have multiple journals, the price might increase.
JATS XML support
Currently, the support for JATS XML is not directly provided. However, OJS software offers a library of plugins that can do the conversion to JATS XML. You can choose one of the free plugins to get the job done.
Unlimited Articles, Storages and Standalone server
Like Typeset, PKP’s service unlimited articles and storages in all the plans. Standalone server is also provided in plans starting from 2700$/year.
Backups & Security
Both are provided, reasonable to industry standards.
Email Service integration
No information is currently provided regarding integraion with any email service provider. In such cases, do not worry. Setting up a simple SMTP server can get your work done. (StackOverflow discussion)
Dedicated Account managers & Webinars
Support and training is provided on higher value plans, which start from 1500$/year
Custom themes
Similar to Typeset, PKP’s OJS Service also provides custom themes at an additional cost.