Hi @frhoff,
I’ve consulted with a few of my colleagues, and unfortunately there is no easy way to do this, other than editing the title information in the SQL table manually, which would be done in publication_settings table. There is a bit of a mention of a strip tags utility here: How to make italics in article title in OJS 3 - #7 by ctgraham - although, it doesn’t go into detail as to how to implement it. And, you’d likely have to write your own command line script/tool to utilize it.
As noted, there is hopes of having a better way of handling HTML tags in titles in place for 3.4. You can follow along on the issue here, if you’d like: Inconsistent HTML display in article titles · Issue #2564 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub
-Roger
PKP Team