Janeway.

We build world-leading, open-source digital publishing infrastructure to provide a sustainable platform for OLH journals.

Our dedicated in-house software engineers have developed an intuitive, agile, and responsive platform for journal hosting, migration, manuscript submission, review, copyediting, and typesetting. The platform is called Janeway.

“The first thing to know about Janeway is that it is not just a submission system and platform. It is a complete publishing tool that allows the editors to basically operate as . . . a publisher. That makes it hugely empowering.”

Johan Rooryck, Editor-in-Chief of the linguistics journal Glossa, in a first-hand account of using Janeway.

How Janeway came into being.

OLH Co-Founder Prof. Martin Eve and Director of Publishing Technologies Andy Byers began building Janeway in June 2017, over one long weekend of coding. They imagined a platform that was clean, agile, and responsive. In a shift from existing scholar-led publishing infrastructure, Martin and Andy built the platform in Python using the Django framework. Python was chosen for its readability and flexibility, its vibrant open-source ecosystem of libraries and frameworks, and its dedicated communities of developers, scientists, and researchers. Django was created by newspaper publishers in the 2000s to power increasingly digital publication workflows and still ranks as one of the best and most resilient frameworks for powering web applications.

Janeway is licensed under an open-source copyleft license, which means it is freely available for anyone to use providing they make their contributions similarly open. What Martin and Andy built quickly became the platform of choice for editors, librarians, and publishers at universities worldwide. The Janeway community now includes the University of California, the University of Michigan, MIT, the University of Wales, UCL Press, University of Arizona, the University of Ghent, and the Technical University of Darmstadt.

Publishing our journal content using our own software ensures that the OLH remains independent from commercial publishing platforms. By removing the profit margins of infrastructure providers, the OLH has demonstrated that diamond open-access publishing is affordable, scalable, and sustainable.

Intuitive design.

The platform has an intuitive design, allowing editors to move articles easily through the publishing workflow, from submission into peer review, through copyediting, typesetting, and into publication. Authors, editors, and reviewers are given their own dashboard and data is stored securely in accordance with GDPR legislation.

This design approach extends to the reader’s experience of published articles. Article templates have been designed to be user-friendly, with a modern, clean look and feel. Published in HTML, they are mobile-friendly using a responsive design. JATS XML markup makes them machine-readable and archive-friendly, and PDF downloads make them portable and easy to read offline.

Empowering editors.

Janeway is built to empower editors and give them autonomy over the publishing process. The Janeway developers work day-to-day with the wider OLH editorial team, drawing on our editors’ expertise as users to shape how the platform evolves. We also continue our scholar-led tradition through research into what our users need, continually improving our software to put scholars in charge.

In keeping with our belief in openness, anyone can comment on, make feature suggestions for, or contribute to the codebase. This means we are continually developing features with scholars’ needs in mind.

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