Ubiquity Press and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have entered into an agreement to work more closely together. This agreement is strategically aligned with Ubiquity’s commitment to Open Source Software under its new Customer Charter. Ubiquity has used the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software to manage the editorial process for its journals since inception and OJS will continue to play a role into the future.

Earlier this year, we released the first in our series of new themes for OJS 3 — the Health Science theme. Using the contemporary and humanist typeface, Fira Sans, this theme was designed with cleanliness, simplicity and accessibility in mind. Today, we’d like to share a new style guide we’ve written to help you make the best use of that theme.

Ready to sprint? We’re getting ready for another PKP sprint, this time in fabulous Heidelberg, Germany. The sprint will run from Thursday, September 20 through Friday, September 21, 2018. We are extremely grateful to our local host, the University of Heidelberg and look forward to meeting more friends from the German OJS network and elsewhere. You can read more about their activities here.

At the PKP Code Sprint in 2017, a group of PKP community members/supporters created a report on PKP’s myriad documentation. As our software had grown over ~20 years, so too had our solutions for platform- and task-specific documentation. By the end of the sprint, the group identified redundant and deprecated documentation for outdated versions of software, specific plugins, unique tasks, and information on publishing.

We’re pleased to release our 2017 PKP Annual Report to the Community, providing a brief overview of our major accomplishments over the past year, in all areas of our activities, including software development, services, research, partnerships, finances, and more. We’ll be using the Report as a guide for tomorrow’s PKP Virtual Annual General Meeting, and we hope to see you there.

We’ve recently been asked for advice on how to best plan for upgrading to OJS 3. OJS 3 is a significant upgrade from the old OJS 2.x line, which means you will need to do some careful planning with your editors to ensure a smooth process. In many ways, the changes are more human resources related (i.e., training and visual design) than technical, so you’ll want to build in time for that, as well as clear communications at each stage.

The PKP 2018 Annual General Meeting will be held on Wednesday, August 8 from 9am – 11am Pacific Time . It is a free, open, online meeting, so everyone is welcome to attend. The meeting will include some refections on PKP at 20, an update on the latest OJS developments, as well as a question and answer session. PKP 2017 Annual Report is available here.

PKP is pleased to announce an OJS 3.x/OMP plugin supporting iThenticate for plagiarism detection in submission files. Remember that you will first need to register for an account with iThenticate, which is a separate service from PKP. Once you have that, you can follow the steps below to get it working in OJS or OMP.

OJS and OMP users: a reflected XSS vulnerability was reported to us affecting OJS 3.0.0 to 3.1.1-1 (inclusive) and OMP 1.2.0 to 3.1.1-2 (inclusive). The risk is not huge, but it is worth patching/upgrading. Latest releases are OK. Instructions at: https://forum.pkp.sfu.ca/t/xss-vulnerability-alert/ Please post any questions to the linked forum entry and someone will get back to you.

Gracias al trabajo de la traductora María Elena Sánchez Salazar, con el apoyo del equipo editorial del Instituto de Geografía, UNAM, tenemos nuestro primer curso de PKP School en español — Configuración de una revista en OJS 3. Gracias también a Raúl Marcó del Pont Lalli y Claudio Amescua de UNAM por apoyar la traducción. Con más de 1700 revistas en países de habla hispana, este curso les ayudará a hacer el mejor uso de OJS.

We’re very excited to announce the release of the “Health Science” theme for OJS 3.1.1, freely available to anyone to use or modify for their journal. Created by graphic designer Sophy O and built by developers Vitalii Bezsheiko and Nate Wright, this new theme was conceptualized with the Health Sciences in mind, but can, of course, be used for journals in any discipline.