The live platform: stardomuniversityscientificjournals.edu.eu — 7 interconnected sites · 6 journals with their own ISSNs · 100+ pages and policy documents · accredited by EBSCO, ISI Indexing and E-Marefa · bilingual Arabic / English.
The brief
Stardom University wanted to launch six specialized peer-reviewed journals covering economics & administration, law & political science, Islamic & sharia studies, education & psychology, humanities & social sciences, and natural sciences & engineering. Off-the-shelf journal software was either too rigid, too heavy, or couldn't deliver the bilingual Arabic/English experience and university branding the client wanted.
The requirement wasn't "six websites." It was publishing infrastructure: manuscript submission and tracking, double-blind peer review, permanent article identifiers, harvesting endpoints for international indexes, long-term archiving, and a membership economy around it — everything a serious journal operation needs to be taken seriously by indexers and researchers.
The architecture: seven sites, one engine
I designed the system as a multi-tenant platform: one custom PHP/MySQL codebase powering a central portal at the root domain and six journal instances on dedicated subdomains (management, law, islamic-studies, education-psych, humanities, engineering). Each journal behaves as a fully independent publication — its own ISSN, editorial board, aims & scope, archives by volume and issue, policies and statistics — while sharing the same engine underneath. Adding a seventh journal is a configuration task, not a rebuild.
The central portal acts as the ecosystem's front door: a journal directory, unified researcher membership, submission routing, publication ethics, indexing & accreditations, editorial boards and FAQ.
The editorial workflow, end to end
Authors register, submit manuscripts through the journal portal, and track their paper through every stage of review. Every submission is screened with Turnitin. Reviewers and editors work through a structured double-blind peer review workflow, backed by published peer-review and plagiarism policies and dedicated guides for authors, reviewers and editors. Accepted papers are assembled into quarterly issues with bilingual article pages — abstracts in both Arabic and English, with RTL-aware layouts.
Built to international publishing standards
This is what separates a "journal website" from a publishing platform. The system implements the protocols and metadata standards that international indexes actually require:
DOI per article. Every published paper receives a permanent DOI under the registered prefix 10.70170, with CLOCKSS long-term digital preservation.
OAI-PMH 2.0 repository. A from-scratch implementation of the Open Archives Initiative protocol — the machine interface that DOAJ, BASE and CORE use to harvest journal metadata. It's live and verifiable at each journal's /oai endpoint.
DOAJ XML export. One-click administrative export of article metadata in DOAJ's schema, plus Dublin Core meta tags on every page for library discovery systems.
SEO + AEO layer. Per-journal sitemaps, RSS feeds, Open Graph cards, canonical URLs — and an llms.txt file so AI search engines can read the publication structure. CC BY 4.0 licensing is declared machine-readably.
The business layer
Beyond publishing, the portal runs a three-tier paid membership program for researchers — Researcher, Senior Researcher and Fellow — with benefits like submission-fee waivers, members directory listing, certificates and priority review. The journal ecosystem becomes a self-sustaining research community rather than a cost center.
Stack & scope
Custom PHP + MySQL application, hand-written front end, OAI-PMH 2.0 XML services, Schema.org and Dublin Core structured metadata, RTL-aware bilingual layouts, and a shared admin layer across all seven sites. Designed, architected, developed and deployed end-to-end by one developer.
Explore it live: the central portal and, for example, the Journal of Economic and Management Studies (E-ISSN 2980-3799). If your institution needs a publishing platform, a portal or a system at this level, it starts with a conversation.