In Open Journal Systems (OJS) 3.3, some journals notice that when an article PDF is opened using the
PDF.JS Viewer, the browser tab title appears as “View of Article Title”.
While this is expected behavior, many journal editors and article authors find it unnecessary or distracting.

In some cases, the same article may appear in Google search results both with and without the
“View of …” prefix, which can be confusing and may give the impression that they are different pages.
At the moment, there is no confirmed evidence that this has a direct negative impact on Google Scholar.
However, from an editorial and presentation perspective, many journals prefer to display only the article title.

Why does “View of …” appear?

The PDF viewer page title is built using a translation key in the OJS locale files:
article.pageTitle. In the default English locale, this key is often defined as:
View of {$title}. That’s why the browser tab title becomes “View of …”.

Why this can be undesirable

• It may look unprofessional or unnecessary to editors and authors.
• Google search results may show the same article twice (with and without “View of …”).
• Readers may assume the entries represent different articles.
• Presentation may feel inconsistent across languages.

What NOT to do

You can remove the prefix by editing core files such as locale/en_US/locale.po
via FTP/SFTP. However, this is not update-safe. Future OJS upgrades can overwrite core locale files,
causing the “View of …” prefix to return.

Recommended solution: Custom Locale Plugin (Update-Safe)

The cleanest approach is to override the translation string using the Custom Locale Plugin,
so you do not modify core files and your change survives updates.

Step 1: Enable the Custom Locale Plugin

Go to Administration → Website Settings → Plugins, then enable
Custom Locale Plugin.

Step 2: Find the correct locale file and key

Important note: the Custom Locale interface does not provide a direct global search box.
After selecting a language, OJS will show a list of locale files for that language.

1. Open the Custom Locale interface and select the language English (en_US).
2. After selecting the language, you will see the list of locale files. From the list, open
   locale/en_US/locale.po.
3. Inside that file, locate the translation key article.pageTitle.
   You can also confirm this key by checking the same file via FTP/SFTP first and noting the exact label to override.

Step 3: Override the page title string

Once you find article.pageTitle, update its value from
View of {$title} to {$title}.
This removes the “View of ” prefix while keeping the article title placeholder intact.

Step 4: Clear cache

After saving the override, clear the OJS cache to ensure the new translation loads.
If you have server access, remove template/cache files from the OJS cache directory (common locations include
cache/t_compile). Then hard refresh your browser.

Result

After applying this override, the PDF viewer page title will display only the article title.
The “View of …” prefix will be removed, and because this is done through Custom Locale, it will remain
in place even after OJS updates.

Final note on indexing

There is no confirmed evidence that this behavior negatively impacts Google Scholar indexing.
Still, removing “View of …” can help keep your journal’s presentation clean and reduce confusion in general
Google search results when duplicate-looking entries appear.