What the Journal Manager manages is the publishing system. This does not involve any advanced technical skills, but entails filling out templates and uploading files. The Journal Manager does the Setup for the journal, and enrolls the Editors, Section Editors, Copyeditors, Layout Editors, Proofreaders, and Reviewers. Actually, the names and emails of the Reviewers, if they already exist in a database can be imported into the system, through the Import People function under People. The Journal Manager also has access to the journal's other management systems, and can create new Sections for the journal, edit the default set of Emails the system uses, manage the Reading Tools that are available with this journal, and see to the Journal Statistics the system can generate.

Note that although the Journal Manager role is ostensibly a per-journal role, journal managers should be considered system-wide trusted users in the current release of OJS. In future releases, additional security restrictions may be put in place to enforce a stricter separation of powers between individual journals hosted within a single OJS system.