The Public Knowledge Project develops open source software for scholarly publishing and conducts research on scholarly communication.

OJS 3.0 supports a powerful templating engine that allows well-resourced organisations to produce professional, highly-tailored publishing platforms, like this example from The Finnish Scholarly Journals Online. But we’re always working to make it easier for journals of all sizes to publish an online site that fits their needs.

Instructors around the world are increasingly making use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) to save students money and to enhance learning outcomes. PKP is a strong supporter of the OER movement and our OJS and OMP applications play an important role by providing open source software for anyone, anywhere to create openly licensed scholarly journals or books (including open textbooks) for use in the classroom.

For the past few years, our organization, its team members, and individuals in our user community have been subjected to online harassment by, we have reasonable grounds to believe, an individual who claims PKP is attempting to destroy their business (even though their business relies on the open source software PKP maintains). We have been collectively and personally accused of having done all sorts of inappropriate and even illegal acts, with

A recent wave of spam email was sent to many members of the OJS community suggesting that OJS is insecure and that only the spammer’s product, which is not affiliated in any way with PKP, could prevent hacking.

The Public Knowledge Project is pleased to issue this Call for Proposals for the PKP 2017 International Scholarly Publishing Conference to be held in Montreal, Quebec on August 2, 3, and 4, 2017. The conference will co-hosted by our friends at Érudit, and will take place at the Université de Montréal. Montreal is Canada’s second largest city and has a major international airport making travel easy from most locations.

The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies has launched its new Finnish Scholarly Journals Online platform, a national portal for the best of Finnish scholarship. The site currently features 35 journals covering a broad range of topics, and includes archives going back multiple years.

PKP is pleased to have been invited to join the Advisory Board for the HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure) Project.

Open access subscriptions? Check out John’s latest column on Slaw.ca using historical analysis to point the way to a future alternative: Among those of trying to imagine an alternative economic arrangement for scholarly publishing that will result in public access to research and scholarship, the journal subscription has become seemingly immovable impediment to the wider distribution of this form of intellectual property.

PKP is partnering with the Educopia Institute and others in the Developing a Curriculum to Advance Library-Based Publishing project to create educational materials to support library-based publishers. Applications are now being accepted to develop content in the areas of Policy, Content, Impact, or Sustainability.

2016 has been a big year for the Public Knowledge Project, with the release of major new versions of both OMP and OJS, a new development partner, new grants, and much more. In this first edition of the PKP Newsletter, we’re highlighting some of those achievements. These accomplishments would not have been possible without an amazing community of development partners, sponsors, committee members, contributors, translators, volunteers, and users.