Companies Using Open Journal Systems

With Open Journal Systems I can tell you almost exactly what each detected site is: a journal, or a portal of journals. Our October 2026 crawl counts 6,138 domains. A domain counts when it sets OJS's session cookie, OJSSID, or carries a generator tag naming Open Journal Systems, and the check holds up. In a random sample of 120 live domains, 104 of the 109 pages that loaded carried an OJS marker; the other five were a bot check, a hacked page and three journals on customised platforms. 2,344 domains match an organisation, 38.2%.

Domains, portals and journals

One domain is often many journals. All 50 rows in our top list run OJS on a subdomain, usually revistas., periodicos. or journals., and a single portal can hold dozens of titles. PKP's own usage page counts 58,221 journals that published five or more items with OJS in 2025. Our 6,138 is a count of the sites those journals live on. No host or fleet dominates: the most domains any one organisation holds is 10, São Paulo State University's faculty subdomains, and our title filter removed only 33 for-sale and gambling pages.

Sales signal: sell per portal, not per journal. One library or research office usually runs every journal on a domain, so one contact can open dozens of titles.

Coverage climbed, the base didn't

The chart reads 3,146 in June, 4,278 in July, 5,253 in August, 6,077 in September and 6,138 in October. The set of domains we crawl turns over every month, with dead sites dropping out and new ones added, and our detection widened over the summer; together they explain most of that line. October's 61-domain gain is the first month I'd read as real. 217 domains dropped OJS on at least one hostname since March 2026, and 26 of them still run it on another hostname, so fewer than 200 left.

"A journal portal is a ten-year decision. Fewer than 200 of 6,138 OJS domains have left it since March, and we can't yet tell a platform switch from a journal that closed." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: treat OJS as a fixed installed base. New business comes from services on top of it, such as hosting, upgrades, DOI registration and indexing support, not from a wave of new adopters.

Most portals keep up with PKP

Version data is unusually complete here: 5,781 domains state a version, 94.6% of the 6,114 we saw in the last 75 days. PKP's releases page lists three supported versions in October 2026: 3.5, the long-term release, until Q2 2029, and 3.4 and 3.3 until Q2 2027. 4,786 domains, 82.8%, run one of them. 3.3 alone has 2,652, and 901 already run 3.5. The other 995 run an end-of-life version: 367 on 3.2, 374 on 3.1, 24 on 3.0 and 230 still on OJS 2.x. Named examples include the University of Ghana's portal on 3.2.1 and the Federal University of Pará's on 2.4.8.

"Nearly two in three OJS portals that state a version need an upgrade within a year: 2,652 sit on 3.3 ahead of PKP's 2027 end date, and 995 are already past theirs." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: that's a dated, countable upgrade pipeline for OJS hosts and service firms. The 230 portals on 2.x are the hardest jobs and the most urgent.

Universities first, then publishers

Higher Education is 34.1% of matched organisations, and the wider education cluster 44.98%. Publishing is second at 17.62% (Book and Periodical Publishing plus Periodical Publishing), then Research Services at 7.93%. Size splits the same two ways: 44.68% have 1 to 10 employees, the small publishers and single journals, while 228 have more than 1,000. Founding years agree. 30.6% were founded before 1990 and 11.37% before 1960.

Sales signal: there are two buyers. At a university the library or research office runs the portal and decides for every journal on it. Independent publishers are small, price-sensitive and more likely to rent cheap hosting.

Indonesia and Latin America

Indonesia leads with 433 matched organisations, and the addresses say the same thing: 817 OJS domains sit on .ac.id addresses, 13.0% of the set, more than all other .edu and .ac domains worldwide combined (684). Brazil is second with 279, then India (148) and the United States (137). Group the Latin American countries and they pass Indonesia: Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Peru and Ecuador add up to 435. Pakistan (71) and Nigeria (36) both make the top 12.

Sales signal: for anyone selling into academic publishing, the OJS list is a ready map of Indonesian, Brazilian and Spanish-speaking Latin American universities. Outreach in Spanish, Portuguese and Indonesian will reach more of it than English.

The stack around it

PHP shows on 44.0% of the 6,286 live domains we analysed and Google Analytics on 38.48%. jsDelivr (27.62%) and cdnjs (27.0%) serve theme and library files. WordPress appears on 23.18%, but only 5 of those 1,457 domains run it on the OJS host; it's the university's main site on another hostname. Hostinger is the one host that stands out: it serves the journal itself on 782 domains, 12.4% of the set, and 629 of the 906 domains with Hostinger anywhere sit outside .edu and .ac addresses. GoDaddy follows at 5.11%.

Sales signal: Hostinger's journals are the independent end of the market, publishers who picked cheap shared hosting. They're the natural audience for managed OJS hosting.

What OJS costs

The software is free: PKP releases it under the GNU General Public License version 3. The cost is hosting and upkeep. OpenJournalSystems.com, one commercial host, lists plans at $500 a year for a single journal and $600 or $900 for multi-journal installs, checked in October 2026.

Sales signal: price anchors are low. A managed offer competes with a $500-a-year plan and with free self-hosting on a university server, so sell the upgrade and the support, not the server.

Key takeaways

1. 6,138 domains, 7th of 70 in Documentation & Knowledge Base, though nothing else there publishes journals.

2. A clean count: 104 of 109 loaded sample pages carried an OJS marker, and no fleet or single host dominates.

3. Indonesia leads with 433 matched organisations; Latin America together has 435.

4. 82.8% of versioned portals run a supported release, but 2,652 on 3.3 face PKP's Q2 2027 end date.

5. Two buyers: universities (44.98% in education) and small publishers on shared hosting.

How to use this list

Filter by country and version, then dedupe by portal. For the full list of 6,138 Open Journal Systems domains with organisation and stack data, explore TechnologyChecker.io.