Technical Support Plan — per year

Overview

You host OJS yourselves, and that is the right decision for your institution. But upgrades keep slipping, the one person who understands the platform is stretched, and when something breaks the editors have nobody to call. The Technical Support Plan gives your self-hosted installation the same upgrade discipline and support access as our managed hosting, without moving anything.

This is for libraries, IT departments and presses running Open Journal Systems, the free, open-source software from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), on their own infrastructure.

What’s Included

• Named support contacts — specific people who know your installation, reachable by email and ticket
• Response SLA — committed response times by severity, set out in the agreement
• Upgrades — OJS minor and major releases planned, rehearsed on staging and applied to your production instance within an agreed window after release
• Security patches — applied promptly when PKP issues security releases
• Plugin and theme compatibility — checks and fixes for your installed plugins and theme at each upgrade
• Troubleshooting — diagnosis and resolution of platform faults, email delivery problems, plugin errors and configuration issues
• Annual health review — a written check of configuration, backups, security settings and version status

How It Works

1. Onboarding: we document your environment, obtain agreed access and establish a staging copy.
2. Your staff raise tickets; we respond within the SLA.
3. We schedule and apply upgrades and patches on the agreed cadence.
4. Annual health review and renewal. Pricing is per installation per year, with a per-journal component for multi-journal instances.

Platform Independence

Nothing moves. The installation, domain, DOI prefix and data remain on your infrastructure under your control. OJS is open-source; the plan is a service on top of software you already own. Cancel at the end of any term and keep everything.

Important Limitations

• Access required — we need server access sufficient to apply upgrades. Without it, support is limited to advice.
• Infrastructure is yours — server hardware, operating system, PHP and database versions, backups and uptime remain your responsibility. We advise; we do not operate your servers.
• Scope — the plan covers platform operation, not editorial support, manuscript production or new feature development.
• External fees — none are expected; any third-party charges are passed through at cost.

Common Questions

How is this different from managed hosting?
Managed hosting includes servers, backups and uptime. The Technical Support Plan assumes you provide those and adds expert OJS support and upgrades on top.

Does it cover a very old installation?
An instance several versions behind is first brought current through Platform Rescue & Upgrade, then enrolled in the plan.

Can our developers still make changes?
Yes, within a simple change-notification process so our upgrades do not overwrite your work.

Request a proposal, or begin with the Journal Health Check.