Originally posted on the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation blog. Where once, a half-century ago, peace, love and non-medicinal weed filled the air of the Bay Area, the groove today is all about collaboration, cooperation, and open sourcing. From Google to Tesla, IBM to Microsoft, Stanford to Berkeley, the bit-rate of open source vibes is increasing, amid non-proprietary visions and loss-less business sensibilities.

The Global Open Textbook Co-operative is a 1 year pilot project of the Simon Fraser University Library and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) to investigate the interest in and viability of a co-operative model for supporting the creation and sharing of open textbooks.

When we redesigned the OJS 3.0 backend in time for the beta release, we had to rush out a frontend. We’ve now had a chance to revisit the reader interface, think about the wide variety of use-cases we need to support, and put together something we’re pretty happy with. In this post I’ll give you a look at our new frontend reader interface and go into the thinking behind some of the decisions we made.

We’ve worked hard to address accessibility concerns in the new OJS 3.0 beta. When we overhauled the design, we were able to address a number of basic issues. In this post, I’ll detail some of the things we did to solve existing problems and some of the problems we plan to tackle going forward.

You may not know that PKP has a pretty storied history with automated article parsing. Many, many years ago (circa 2008), we had a project called Lemon8-XML which worked as a complementary application to OJS.

The launch of OMP and the redevelopment of OJS 3.0 on that new codebase gives us the opportunity to tackle a bunch of improvements around our support for plugins. Read on for some details about our plans for the near future!

The PKP Index is a new database of articles, books, and conference proceedings that have been published using PKP’s free, open source Open Journal Systems, Open Monograph Press, and Open Conference Systems software applications. We have developed this service because new journals find it difficult to be included in major indexing services, often having to wait two years or more to demonstrate a consistent publishing record.

Meet the Team is a new series of blog posts introducing different members of the PKP team. First up is James MacGregor. James is Publishing Services Coordinator at PKP, and ensures that PKP’s hosting, external support, consulting, and sponsored development initiatives run smoothly. PKP Publishing Services provides a significant portion of the overall PKP budget, and interest in it continues to grow unabated.

For the past year, the PKP Private LOCKSS Network (PLN) has been in a pilot phase, with the University of Victoria, University of Pittsburgh, University of Alberta, University of British Columbia, Indiana University, and Simon Fraser University testing various aspects of the Network, ranging from the new OJS plugin to the terms of use that journal managers must accept to have their journals be preserved.

PKP is pleased to announce the commencement of a strategic relationship with the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation.  The CKF’s mission is to evolve how scholarship is created, produced and reported. CKF is building open source solutions in scholarly knowledge production that foster collaboration, integrity and speed.

PKP is pleased to announce its support for the Hypothes.is initiative to bring a  pervasive implementation of web-based annotation support across scholarship, based on open technologies and an open web protocol. They have invited a wide range of participants from the scholarly publishing sector to support their initiative and this is a very natural commitment for PKP.