What is included
Every hosted journal gets the same service. There is no tiering and no upsell. A small student-run title receives the same infrastructure as a long-established society journal.
| Area | Provided by the Hub | Stays with you |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | OJS instance, hosting, updates, backups, uptime monitoring | Journal configuration and look |
| Identifiers | DOI registration and maintenance, ORCID integration | None |
| Preservation | PKP Preservation Network and LOCKSS deposit | None |
| Discovery | Indexing applications, metadata quality checks, OAI-PMH | Abstracts and keywords |
| Editorial | Workflow advice, policy templates, training | All editorial decisions |
| Copyediting and typesetting | Guidance and tooling | The work itself, or your own arrangement |
What we do not do
We do not copyedit, typeset or proofread your articles, and we do not supply editorial staff. Those remain the journal's responsibility. Being explicit about this early prevents the most common source of disappointment.
Eligibility
To be hosted, a journal needs to meet four conditions:
- A substantive connection to Irish research: an Irish editorial base, host institution, or scholarly community
- Genuine diamond open access, with no charges to authors or readers, now or planned
- A functioning peer review process, described publicly
- An identified editorial team of more than one person
We assess against these together, not as a checklist. A new title with a strong team and no back catalogue is a better prospect than an established one with no succession plan.
Migration
Most journals arrive with a back catalogue in some state of disorder. That is expected. Migration typically takes six to twelve weeks, and the variable is almost always metadata quality rather than article count.
- Audit. We inventory what exists (articles, metadata, DOIs, images, supplementary files) and identify the gaps.
- Cleanup. Metadata is normalised and enriched. This is where the time goes, and where you may need to answer questions about older issues.
- Import and check. Content is loaded into a staging instance for your review before anything is public.
- Redirects and launch. Old URLs redirect to new ones so existing citations keep resolving.
Editor support and training
Hosting without support is just a server. Ongoing support includes a named contact, a shared editors' forum twice a year, and advice on the recurring hard problems: reviewer recruitment, handling misconduct allegations, retraction and correction procedure, and indexing applications.
Training runs three times a year and is open to any Irish journal, hosted with us or not.
OJS for editors
Half a day. Submission through to publication, using your own journal as the example.
Next: September 2026
Metadata and indexing
Half a day. What indexers actually check, and how to fix the common failures.
Next: October 2026
Questions
Is it really free?
Yes, for the funded period. Hosting, DOIs, preservation and support are covered by project funding. The long-term intention is a shared institutional funding model rather than reintroducing charges. That work is under way and hosted editors will be consulted well before anything changes.
What happens if the project funding ends?
The hosting agreement commits us to a minimum twelve months' notice and a full data export in standard formats. Your content is preserved independently in the PKP Preservation Network regardless of what happens to us. We would rather state this plainly than have you discover it in a crisis.
Can we keep our own domain name?
Yes. Journals can run on a subdomain of the Press site or on their own domain pointed at the platform. You keep ownership of the domain either way.
Do we have to change our editorial policies?
Only where they conflict with diamond open access or with the ethical baseline we require. We will flag anything that would block a DOAJ application, but the editorial direction of the journal is yours.
How long until we are indexed in DOAJ?
DOAJ requires a publication history and complete policy documentation. For an established title, applications are usually possible soon after migration. For a new journal, expect to publish for at least a year first. We prepare and submit the application with you.
Tell us about your journal
A short conversation is enough for us both to know whether this is a fit.