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.

2016 has been an important year for the Public Knowledge Project, with the release of OJS 3.0 and OMP 1.2, receiving the SSHRC Impact Award, sprints in Montreal and Fredericton, being part of the successful application by Erudit for the CFI Cyberinfrastructure grant, the launch of the PKP Index and PKP LOCKSS Network, and OJS reaching the 10,000 journals mark.

We are very pleased to announce that PKP’s Open Journal Systems is now being used by more than 10,000 active journals around the world. This makes OJS the leading online publishing platform, with more active titles than any other provider, including the major commercial publishers. These numbers only include journals that are active , defined as having published at least 10 articles in the current year (with an average of 42 overall).

PKP is very happy to announce that we have recently become members of the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), under their “Other Organization” category, alongside such good friends as DOAJ, INASP, Knowledge Unlatched, SciELO, SPARC Europe, and others.

We are delighted to announce that Dr. John Willinsky, PKP Director, Professor in the SFU Publishing Program, and Khosla Family Professor at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, has received the Connection Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), one of Canada’s major national funding agencies.

The participants in the Theming and Documentation group at the Fall 2016 PKP Sprint at the University of New Brunswick included: Carola Fanselow, Michael Felczak, Vanessa Gabler, Roger Gillis, Mike Nason, Kaitlin Newson, Kevin Stranack, Marco Tullney, and Nate Wright. Thanks to all of them for their work!

With the launch of OMP 1.2 (April 2016) and OJS 3.0 (August 2016) behind us, we are making plans for future releases, and the associated functionality that will be included with each new one. You can see a detailed list of releases and issues on our github milestones page.

Special thanks to this group’s participants: Brian C, Antti K, Kassim M, and Alec S! During the Fall 2016 PKP Sprint event in Fredericton, New Brunswick, one of the tasks we decided to work on was the development of a REST API for OJS 3.0. REST APIs are a perennial favourite subject — we’ve worked on this before at past events, and spoken with numerous users and partners in order to gather requirements for what the API should cover.

The aim of the OAuth group at the PKP Sprint 2016 in Fredericton was to provide the possibility for the users to log into the system using their credentials from other applications, e.g. using their ORCID, Google, or Facebook account. During the sprint a generic plugin was developed that allows users to log into OJS with their ORCID account. For the authentication with ORCID, the ORCID public API is used.

The latest webinar from the Library Publishing Coalition is OA Journal Publishing: DOAJ Indexing and Best Practice, featuring Judith Barnsby from the DOAJ. The webinar will be of interest to anyone wanting to get their open access journal indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and reviews the requirements for inclusion in DOAJ, and some best practice recommendations, including the criteria for the DOAJ Seal.

As part of PKP’s ongoing work to advance access to high quality research, Managing Director Brian Owen recently participated in a meeting of the Canadian Scholarly Publishing Working Group. The Group includes stakeholder representatives from libraries, journals, presses, researchers, funding agencies, and publishing service providers coming together to explore opportunities for supporting Canadian scholarly publishing.