A WordPress plugin for academic journals
I'm building Citeable because I believe that Open Access Publishing can be flexible, intuitive, and more functional. This is the problem, and what I'm doing about it.1
Most scholarly journals that aren't owned by a large commercial publisher run on a complete publishing platform. Open Journal Systems is the industry leader;2 Janeway is a newer and genuinely well-made alternative.3 They do serious work, and for a university press running many titles they may be the right tool for them.
But they are complete systems. Each is a separate application — its own software stack, its own server, its own logins — that someone has to install, secure, update and keep alive. For many publishers OJS arguably does too much, and because there isn't much of a market for journal software, there's comparatively little public knowledge about how to run, theme or fix it. The handful of lighter, plugin-based options that have appeared over the years have mostly gone unmaintained.
There's also a quieter mismatch. A learned society, an association, a department, or a research centre rarely starts from nothing: it already has a website — and that website is, more often than not, WordPress.4 Running the journal on a separate platform means a second site beside the first, with another system to learn, separate accounts, and one more thing that can break — when the place a journal most naturally belongs is the website you already have.
I've been involved in editing legal journals for almost a decade. For much of that time, I've been using OJS.5 I had previously written a lighter WordPress plugin to present a journal in an OJS-like manner. It was basic, but it worked. Then I encountered a problem in another, OJS-based, journal and I realised I already had a foundation on which to build something new.
Citeable is a WordPress plugin. WordPress is the world's most widely used CMS — powerful, flexible, and likely already familiar to the people who would run the journal. Unlike OJS, there's a great deal of public knowledge about how to operate, maintain and fix it.
The point isn't only the software. It's that the journal lives inside the site an organisation already runs: one site, one set of accounts, one place where a society's membership, its news, and its journal sit together — rather than an island reached through a separate address and a forgotten password. You build on what you already have.
The other half of the approach is how little it should ask of you. Editors of independent journals are academics first; the software shouldn't turn publishing into a second job. So the aim is to take work away — sensible defaults already filled in before you arrive, single clear actions instead of multi-page detours (invite a reviewer, send a decision, publish an issue, in a click), and a workflow where you can always see where a paper is and what happens next.
The place a journal most naturally belongs is the website you already have.
An earlier iteration already presents a live journal, and it has grown in small, frequent releases. The publishing and editorial sides are both in place — the editor’s overview, a full statistics dashboard, guest-edited special issues, a configurable editorial board, long-term archiving and author accounts that gather a person’s work — and the privacy, security and data-protection review for beta is done. What remains before the first public beta is reader-facing discovery and a full data export.
Volumes, issues and articles as proper content types, with structured authors (affiliation, ORCID, corresponding author), issue covers, and member-only PDFs.
The whole look is a WordPress theme — change it without touching content, workflow or indexing. See one journal in three themes →
Google Scholar metadata, an OAI-PMH endpoint for harvesters and libraries, CrossRef DOI deposit, and citation export in BibTeX, RIS and OSCOLA.
Submissions handled as their own records, moving through editorial stages, with an editor's inbox, a structured submission form, a checklist, an editorial log, and promotion to an article for production on acceptance.
Reviewers work through a private link without needing an account, invited straight from the submission and drawn from a reviewer pool with a turnaround they can set per review. Invitations are emailed automatically.
Built on WordPress's block editor, so issue and article layouts are editable and the design stays the journal's own. Classic templates are kept as a fallback.
A toolkit to move an existing OJS journal across — metadata and PDFs included — so the back catalogue comes with it.
Guest-edited special issues: appoint guest editors who each get a walled-off account running only their issue — bespoke submission link, their own queue and review — while the journal’s editors see it all, tagged. See the workflow →
Define the roles your journal uses and assign them on a drag-and-drop team screen; each editor fills their own profile. A public board block lists the team by role with photos and country flags, naming the editor-in-chief for DOAJ. See it →
A home built for editors: a Tasks inbox of submissions needing a decision — also a dashboard widget — and rearrangeable panels for the forthcoming issue, outcomes, turnaround times and readership. See it →
On a forthcoming issue, accepted articles can be listed publicly — title and authors, marked as in production — so an author has an authoritative record to cite the moment a paper is accepted, long before the issue is out. Something OJS doesn't really do.
Link an author to their account by email or ORCID and their work gathers under it, each paper keeping the affiliation it carried at the time. A public author page shows their current and as-published affiliations together — and a university email suggests the affiliation as they type.
Not just page hits, but genuine reads — and the editorial numbers that matter: submissions, acceptance and desk-reject rates, turnaround times — drawn largely from data the journal already keeps.
The editorial side is built for editors who don't know WordPress — and shouldn't have to. This is what running the journal actually looks like.
The moment an editor logs in, everything waiting for them is right there — how many submissions sit at each stage, and the newest ones ready to open.
Every submission in one list, colour-coded by stage, with review progress and how long each has been waiting — so the whole pipeline reads at a glance.
Each paper opens to a single screen that answers two questions: where is it, and what do I do next? The stages run along the top, the reviewers' progress sits with the decision, and the actions are plain buttons.
The journal writes to authors in its own name. An acknowledgement goes out the moment a paper arrives; decision letters come pre-written for an editor to personalise and send.
Dear Dr Okonkwo,
Thank you for submitting “Comparative method in EU legal pedagogy” to the European Journal of Legal Education. This is to confirm that it has been received and registered for editorial consideration.
You don't need to do anything further for now — we'll be in touch once the editors have had a chance to consider it.
With best wishes,
The editors
The eventual aim is a full platform for managing a journal on WordPress, from submission to publication. The remaining pieces are being built.
Beyond the first release. Once the beta is out, the next themes are trust and craft: verifying author ORCID iDs at sign-in, a revise-and-resubmit round for authors, a light production step before publication, and review forms a journal can shape to its own questions.
It's early days, and it's being built around one journal's specific needs at a time. The eventual goal is a journal that doesn't depend on anyone else to stay online.