Hello PKP Community,
I manage a small, independent academic publishing platform consisting of 9 journal titles running on Open Journal Systems (OJS). The journals do not publish on a regular, high-frequency schedule, and our technical support ticket volume from users is historically very low.
Our website caters to paying librarian subscribers, meaning 24/7 uptime, stable access, and strong data security are vital. We are currently migrating the platform to a fully managed, independent US-based server infrastructure located on the East Coast (NY/NJ region).
While I handle basic day-to-day administration tasks myself, I am looking to hire an ethical, highly reliable freelance OJS Webmaster/Administrator to take complete ownership of our technical health, optimization, and advanced user troubleshooting moving forward.
Core Webmaster Responsibilities:
System Maintenance & Upgrades: Safely execute core OJS system updates, minor version upgrades, and security patches as they are released. We expect major upgrades to be tested first in an isolated staging environment to protect our live database.
Security Auditing & Harvesting Protection: Conduct an initial security audit upon onboarding, followed by routine vulnerability checks 1–2 times per year to harden the application. You will work alongside our managed hosting support to ensure automated rate-limiting (via server firewalls/Fail2Ban/Cloudflare) is active on our OAI-PMH and download pathways to prevent bulk scraping or illegal harvesting of our subscription content.
Metadata Indexing & Crossref Backlog: Manage our metadata infrastructure to ensure discoverability while keeping full-text content protected behind the paywall. This includes setting up the Google Scholar First Click Free (FCF) protocol and helping us strategically register an older historical archive backlog (one journal has roughly 660 back-year articles from issue 1 through 2023) using Crossref’s back-year XML export utility.
User Support (EZproxy Focus): Investigate and resolve occasional technical access issues experienced by institutional users. These are infrequent but typically involve troubleshooting off-campus access routing mismatches via university EZproxy setups (we have an internal custom script that resolves most of these that you can utilize).
SEO & Site Performance Optimization: Ensure our journals are fully discoverable and properly indexed on Google Scholar. Tweak the system/plugins to enhance website visibility and optimize backend configurations for faster loading speeds.
Database Cleanup: Diagnose and resolve character/encoding issues (e.g., legacy database mismatches causing broken text rendering).
Subscriber Metrics & Analytics: Ensure that institutional usage statistics are functional. Specifically, verify and maintain the OJS COUNTER plugin configuration so that library subscribers can easily view and pull aggregated traffic data from their accounts.
Live Collaboration: Be available for brief Zoom meetings or demos if a critical user issue escalates and requires synchronous visual troubleshooting with us.
This is a low-volume, long-term position. We are looking for an independent professional who can work with us on an as-needed hourly basis or a small, predictable monthly maintenance retainer.
Please send me a private message outlining your experience with subscription-based OJS instances, your familiarity with Crossref backlog imports, your general hourly/retainer rates, and your primary timezone. Thank you!