diff --git a/apps/ocr/conf/settings.py b/apps/ocr/conf/settings.py
index a4e9768ba0..b7cce9421e 100644
--- a/apps/ocr/conf/settings.py
+++ b/apps/ocr/conf/settings.py
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ register_settings(
         {'name': u'TESSERACT_LANGUAGE', 'global_name': u'OCR_TESSERACT_LANGUAGE', 'default': u'eng'},
         {'name': u'REPLICATION_DELAY', 'global_name': u'OCR_REPLICATION_DELAY', 'default': 0, 'description': _(u'Amount of seconds to delay OCR of documents to allow for the node\'s storage replication overhead.')},
         {'name': u'NODE_CONCURRENT_EXECUTION', 'global_name': u'OCR_NODE_CONCURRENT_EXECUTION', 'default': 1, 'description': _(u'Maximum amount of concurrent document OCRs a node can perform.')},
-        {'name': u'AUTOMATIC_OCR', 'global_name': u'OCR_AUTOMATIC_OCR', 'default': False, 'description': _(u'Automatically queue newly created documents for OCR.')},
+        {'name': u'AUTOMATIC_OCR', 'global_name': u'OCR_AUTOMATIC_OCR', 'default': True, 'description': _(u'Automatically queue newly created documents for OCR.')},
         {'name': u'QUEUE_PROCESSING_INTERVAL', 'global_name': u'OCR_QUEUE_PROCESSING_INTERVAL', 'default': 10},
         {'name': u'UNPAPER_PATH', 'global_name': u'OCR_UNPAPER_PATH', 'default': u'/usr/bin/unpaper', 'description': _(u'File path to unpaper program.'), 'exists': True},
         {'name': u'PDFTOTEXT_PATH', 'global_name': u'OCR_PDFTOTEXT_PATH', 'default': u'/usr/bin/pdftotext', 'description': _(u'File path to poppler\'s pdftotext program used to extract text from PDF files.'), 'exists': True},
diff --git a/docs/topics/settings.rst b/docs/topics/settings.rst
index 36b6b84ea9..ed9f888596 100644
--- a/docs/topics/settings.rst
+++ b/docs/topics/settings.rst
@@ -352,7 +352,7 @@ Maximum amount of concurrent document OCRs a node can perform.
 
 **OCR_AUTOMATIC_OCR**
     
-Default: ``False``               
+Default: ``True``               
     
 Automatically queue newly created documents or newly uploaded versions
 of existing documents for OCR.