A Right-Sized Migration: Moving SEE's Academic Journal Off CalState Hosting

The Society for Experiential Education (SEE) publishes Experiential Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, a peer-reviewed journal that had been running on Open Journal Systems (OJS) hosted through California State University. SEE wanted to bring the journal under its own roof and asked us to handle the migration.

Scoping the move

The initial ask was straightforward: move the journal off CalState’s servers onto infrastructure SEE would own outright. We scoped and quoted a fully self-hosted OJS deployment, including standing up the server, the database, backups, and the ongoing maintenance that comes with running OJS independently. SEE reviewed the proposal and approved the budget.

A better fit surfaces during planning

Before starting the migration itself, we mapped SEE’s actual needs against what a self-hosted deployment would require of them long after we handed it off: applying OJS updates, patching the server, monitoring uptime, renewing certificates. That’s a reasonable model for an institution with its own IT department. SEE is a nonprofit association without dedicated server operations staff, and a self-hosted setup would have left that maintenance burden sitting with them indefinitely.

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP), the team that builds and maintains OJS, offers its own managed hosting service for exactly this kind of case. It gave SEE everything the self-hosted plan would have, on infrastructure PKP maintains directly, without SEE needing to own a server or without us needing to build one for them. We brought this option to SEE and recommended it over the plan they’d already signed off on.

Doing right by the budget

Recommending managed hosting meant a smaller engagement than the one SEE had approved: less setup work, and no ongoing server management for us to bill for. We refunded the difference rather than keep the original scope’s price tag for a smaller job. An approved budget is a ceiling, not a target, and the right answer for SEE was worth more to us than the size of the invoice.

Executing the migration

With the approach settled, we carried out the full migration from CalState’s OJS instance to SEE’s new PKP-managed environment: journal archives, published issues, editorial workflows, and user accounts all moved over intact. We tested the new environment before cutover and verified that submissions, DOIs, and past issues all carried over intact, keeping the journal accessible to authors, reviewers, and readers throughout.

Conclusion

SEE ended up with a journal platform that costs less to run, carries no server maintenance burden, and sits on infrastructure maintained by the people who build OJS itself, all for less than the plan they originally approved. For us, it’s a case study in a simple rule: recommend the setup that actually fits the client, even after the bigger version has already been sold.