Alternative publication models

26 Continuous publication in a regular issue: “rolling publication”

Last updated: November 18, 2021 for OJS 3.3.0.8

OJS allows you to assign a submission to an issue that has already been published. Doing so immediately publishes the submission. Therefore, implementing a rolling publication model is simple in OJS.

To implement a rolling publication model:

  1. Determine your publication cycle (e.g., annual).
  2. At the beginning of the publication cycle, create a new issue.
  3. Publish the issue[1].
  4. When you have completed the editorial and production workflow for a submission, publish it be assigning it to the current issue in Publication > Issue. The submission will now appear be live on the OJS site.
  5. Repeat step 4 until the end of the publication cycle.
  6. At the end of the publication cycle, return to step 2.

If your journal provides submissions with DOIs, you must manually assign and register the DOI for each new submissions you publish[2].

If you use the rolling publication model, you cannot use OJS’s built-in notification to notify your readers about newly published submissions – it only sends notifications for new issues. You may wish to use the Announcements plugin in order to send notifications about newly published submissions.


  1. You may wish to delay publication of the new issue until you have a submission ready to publish in the new publication cycle. This will prevent OJS from displaying an empty table of contents on your journal's homepage.
  2. Unless you have assigned a submission when you first publish the issue (see footnote 1). In this case, OJS will automatically assign and register the DOI.

License

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OJS for YDJ by Tomasz Mrozewski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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