Relaunching the Journal of Interactive Narrative on the Open Journal System

In May 2025, the journal began accepting and reviewing articles for its second issue. Simultaneously, WordPress started throwing errors, and the server on which we host the journal became infected with some nasty malware. How did it get in? A WordPress plugin, of course. This digital conflagration threw the entire enterprise for a lurch. It prompted the editorial board to consider its options. In the midst of this deliberation, EasyChair came knocking for its annual fee to manage submissions. As this is an Open Access journal, such costs are onerous and ultimately require fundraising through ARDIN. Those funds could be used to subsidize conference fees for students and researchers.

The board was familiar with the Journal of Digital Humanities. (now defunct) that used the Open Journal System (OJS). We began to explore its affordances. What we found was a complete package that enabled us to manage submissions, peer review, and publications. Even better, it is extendable. We can accept fully interactive works and make them available for download. Further, we could offer our interactive scholarship as fully encapsulated HTML files. This affordance enables us to maintain our vision of interactive scholarship, even when a user downloads the article. This option brings us one step closer to leaving PDF, static scholarship behind. The icing on the digital cake is that the OJS system is free of charge. That frees up funds to support up-and-coming researchers and interactive narrative creators.

As Managing Editor, I began the process of moving everything over. This process involved learning how the new system works, making necessary modifications, and integrating everything. Critically, I didn’t want to lose some WordPress functionality. This involved developing custom scripts with the help of AI to implement features such as sliders and extending plugins, including the “Most Read” tool. Now that we have launched the new platform, I am sure we will discover some bugs or issues. Please reach out to me at ojs-admin@ardin.online if you find any. Quick shout-out to Oluwatobi Akerele, a graduate assistant in the Center for Emerging Media Design and Development, for helping me transfer all the articles from the first issue into the new galley formats. His support significantly accelerated the process.

We are gearing up to launch the second issue before the end of the month. We have some exciting articles in store from Gareth Young and Nour Boulahcen, Renske van Enschot, Christian Roth, and Libby van den Besselaar, as well as work on AI and interactive narratives from the ARDIN summer school.

Interested in submitting your work for our third issue? Register above and begin a submission. We would love to have you.

Sincerely,
Joshua A. Fisher, Ph.D.
Managing Editor, Journal of Interactive Narrative