The current series of legal kerfuffles in scholarly publishing involves property and access rights in an industry that is, for all intents and purposes, moving toward universal open access. Let’s begin with recent moves by Elsevier, the largest of scholarly publishing corporations with over 2,000 journals, and the American Chemical Society, among the richest of the non-profit societies.

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is pleased to announce that it has received a six-month planning grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

From  the 5th to 6th of October,  Heidelberg University Library conducted an OJS 3 workshop for developers and technical experts in German-speaking countries.

OJS version 3.1 introduces improvements to the submissions list to help editors and journal managers quickly find and track submissions. These changes allow you to filter submissions by stage, status or section, and quickly search for a submission by title, author name or submission ID. The video below provides a quick introduction to some of these changes.

The Public Knowledge Project is pleased to announce the release of OJS 3.1.0. This release includes several major new pieces of functionality: A REST API Subscription and APC support Section editor recommendations Rich submission lists Customizable menus Finnish and Swedish translations, and numerous translation improvements/updates And more.

Three Sprint participants (Clinton, Rahul, and Svantje) worked on a new user mediation (or new user approval system) for OJS. Objectives In OJS 2.4.8 and OJS 3.0.1, user registration is either all-or-nothing: journal managers decide whether users can self-register, or when the journal manager must register all users.

During the Fall 2017 PKP Sprint event in Montreal, one of the groups decided to focus on improving the current user experience of the Open Typesetting Stack, the OJS3 Open Typesetting Stack plugin, and the Texture WYSIWYG editor used by the Open Typesetting Stack.

At the 2017 PKP Sprint, the Documentation Update and Architecture group worked on a prospective Roadmap for Updating PKP Documentation, aiming to solve broader issues related to the organisation, redundancy, and hosting of distributed documentation across all PKP software.

Special thanks to this group’s participants: Mark Jordan and Dimitris Efstathiou During the PKP 2017 Conference Sprint Sessions, one of the tasks we decided to work on was the development of a process which, given a natively exported OJS 2.x XML file, the OJS 3.x natively exported XML file is being created.

During the 2017 PKP Conference Sprint, our group was responsible to propose enhancements and improvements to the internal workflow statistics of OJS. Our group included Juan Pablo Alperin, Alex Mendonça, Israel Cefrin, Joelle Hatem and had collaborations from Alice Meadows and Ina Smith. The problem Journal editors often have a hard time extracting internal statistics from OJS.

Participants in the Book / Documentation sprint group included: Kenton Good, Andrea Pritt, Jennifer Chan, Jordan Cloutier, Sonya Betz, Mariya Maistrovskaya, Ali Moore, Dana McFarland, Suzanne Jay, Andrea Kosavic, Olga Perkovic, Jeanette Hatherill, Bronwen Sprout, and Roger Gillis.