Like all successful open-source software projects, PKP relies heavily on its community of users to participate and contribute in a variety of ways. Our activities would not be possible without the continued support from all of our users. They ensure that our software, including Open Journal Systems, Open Conference Systems, and Open Monograph Press, continues to be free, supported and enhanced. We will never charge for its download and use.

We recently held our first (but certainly not our last) in-person sprint development session, on March 9-10, 2014, bringing PKP’s developers and outside contributors together to build shared experience working intensively on a limited agenda. The sprint was a lightweight unconference-style event, with a focus on outcomes that could be achieved within the limits of the two-day event.

The PKP School continues to grow! With financial support from INASP and USAID, we’ve added a new financial module to the Becoming an Editors course (http://pkpschool.sfu.ca/becoming-an-editor/module-8/), and two new courses: Writing for Publication  and Becoming a Reviewer.

The Public Knowledge Project team is pleased to announce the release of Open Monograph Press (OMP) 1.1. OMP is an open source software platform for managing the editorial workflow required to see monographs, edited volumes, and scholarly editions through internal and external review, editing, cataloguing, production, and publication. OMP will operate, as well, as a press website with catalog, distribution, and sales capacities.

We are very proud to announce our first European sponsor: OpenEdition. OpenEdition “is proud to support [PKP, and] thereby contribute to the development of open source solutions for digital publishing.

The Public Knowledge Project is excited to announce the first public release of the Dataverse Network plugin for Open Journal Systems 2.3+. This plugin has been developed by PKP in collaboration with Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, with support from the Sloan Foundation, and an earlier version was demonstrated at the 2013 PKP conference in Mexico City.

With the new year well underway (and we hope it has been a good one for everyone so far!), we present the latest issue of the PKP newsletter, with an overview of developments during the last quarter of 2013 and the beginning of 2014. In this issue you will find news about the release of OJS 2.4.3; updated OJS usage statistics; a brief update on the PKP 2013 conference; PKP research and presentations; and our sustainability program.

The PKP School is developing a new course on building library publishing programs, but instead of having one or two people create it, we’re opening it up for anyone to help crowdsource the curriculum. Please drop by the draft syllabus and add your thoughts: http://tinyurl.com/leskmap The post Crowdsourcing a Library Publishing Course appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

For the past two months, PKP’s technical architect and lead developer Alec Smecher and Takuto Kojima from the Fidus Writer team have worked on integrating Fidus Writer and OJS, and a prototype has just been developed. In an interview on Fidus Writer’s website, Alec and Takuto tell us what this means, how far they came and where this could go. You will find some excerpts below.

In the past, we’ve tracked basic OJS installations and titles, but we’re now expanding our understanding of how much content our journals are publishing. In order to provide a better sense of how OJS is being used for journal publishing, we have developed graphs and maps focused specifically on journals that publish at least 10 articles per year. Check out the latest numbers on the new OJS Usage page.

In December 2013, the Joint Committee of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) reached its decision on proposals submitted as part of a call for proposals entitled “ Open Access Scholarly Monographs and Monographic Series “. Two out of 17 proposed projects were approved, and both of these use Open Monograph Press.