Moving a journal from one server to another

Software Support
1

Hi,

Really sorry if this is covered in some place or was already asked, but we have a single journal in one server and we would like to migrate/move it to another one, which already hosts more journals.

The current server has OJS 2.4.8.0 and the new one (which hosts the other journals) has OJS 2.4.8.4.

Could somebody point me to some documentation, steps, etc about this, if possible, please?

Thank you very much!

2

Hi @naoliv

What’s the final desired outcome here? Do you want to end up with a single OJS installation with everything in one place? Or do you just want to run a second OJS installation completely separate from the other one?

The latter is relatively easy to do. The former is not really possible if you want to preserve the workflow of submissions that are not yet published. OJS has plugins for exporting published content in XML format but there is no way to “merge” two OJS installations together.

Best
Jason

3

Hi @jnugent!

Yes, the desired thing is to have all the journals on the server that already hosts multiple journals.

We have:
Server 1 with journal A.
Server 2 with journals B, C, D.

And we would like to have only server 2 with journals A, B, C, D.

4

Hi @naoliv

Okay, so that’s not really possible with OJS, easily. The best you can manage here is to first upgrade your 2.4.8.0 site to 2.4.8.4 (to make the same as the live site), export your published content, and then import it into the other site. You’d lose any articles still in the workflow, and you’d also not be able to migrate any reviews or work done on the published articles during this process. Further your links may change since the newly imported articles will have new submission ids and the submission id is part of the URL when viewing an article in most cases.

Further, users would of course be another matter. Those usually get migrated separately but obviously you can’t import a user if that user’s username or email address already exists in the new installation.

Cheers,
Jason

5

To upgrade from 2.4.8.0 to 2.4.8.4 it is basically applying a patch?
https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/download/patch/ojs-2.4.8_to_2.4.8-4.patch.gz

6

Not entirely. You can apply the patch, but then you need to run the upgrade process. From the command line, in your OJS root folder:

php tools/upgrade.php upgrade

Cheers,
Jason

7

Great.
Thanks a lot, @jnugent!

8

For OJS 2.4.x there is this plugin that allows you to migrate the workflow and not just the published issues: