With the upcoming release of OJS 3 on August 31, you will likely be thinking about when you should upgrade. Here’s what you need to know. Overview OJS 3.0 contains a lot of new concepts and code, so it’s important to plan your migration from OJS 2.x to OJS 3.x in a way that doesn’t disrupt your publication schedule overmuch.

In our ongoing efforts to keep in touch with the community, we have developed a number of ways for you to contact us and stay up to date on our activities, including the new PKP Newsletter.

PKP is very pleased to announce it has become a member of ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). ORCID has been instrumental in advancing the concept of a persistent digital identifier that uniquely distinguishes an author or researcher from everyone else.

The new OJS release 2.4.8-1 brings improvements and usability changes for the Crossref users. In this blog post we are going to introduce the major ones. Status check Crossref DOI registration passes through different stages: After successfully submitted (either by manually uploading the XML file in the Crossref portal or using the “Register” button in OJS) the XML document is queued for deposit.

Mark your calendars! PKP is pleased to announce August 31, 2016 as the release date for Open Journal Systems version 3.0. This is the most comprehensive software upgrade since we moved from OJS 1.0 to 2.0 way back in 2005! It incorporates a decade of feedback from our users on the community forum, through usability testing, and through thousands of conversations, feature requests, and helpful critiques.

After 2 months in production, we are now preserving 317 journals in the new PKP Private LOCKSS Network (PLN). Participation in the PKP PLN is free to anyone using PKP’s OJS software (version 2.4.8 or later), and helps to ensure your content is preserved, even in the case of a catastrophic server crash.

As we approach the upcoming OJS 3 release (date soon to be announced), we wanted to share some of the major new features you’ll see, including editorial discussions, flexible workflows and roles, easier theming, and more. All of the critical features and functionality you expect from OJS have been included in the new release, but we are particularly excited about these new additions.

One of our major goals with OJS 3.0 is to deliver an outstanding user experience for our thousands of journals and the many readers, authors, reviewers, editors, and librarians who use them.

Get ready, PKP Sprinters, we’re gearing up for a Fall 2016 Sprint in beautiful Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, on Sunday/Monday October 2-3, 2016. The event will be co-hosted by PKP and our friends at the University of New Brunswick Library. Our previous sprint, in Montreal, was a resounding success (read about the outcomes on the PKP blog) and we hope you will join us for what we are sure will be another fun and productive couple of days.

Did you know that in addition to making free, open source software for scholarly publishing, PKP also writes detailed documentation, both on using our software, but also for improving your publishing practices. Documents like Learning OJS help you with the tools, and Getting Found, Staying Found help you expand your publishing expertise.

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts (here are the first, second, and third) that introduce draft sections of the new OJS 3 documentation, in preparation for the upcoming release later this summer. This time, we’re looking at the copyediting workflow.