The release of OJS/OMP 3.2 is right around the corner. If your institution has written custom themes or plugins, your technical staff may need to make changes to the code which runs your journals and presses before you update. To help, we’ve prepared a Release Notebook for 3.2 that provides technical guidance on changes that will impact software developers, plugin and theme authors, and anyone who works with the application’s codebase.

Since the last Documentation Interest Group (DIG) update, PKP contributors have been very busy. Kaitlin Newson (Chair, PKP Members Committee and DIG) filled us in with “What’s New with Documentation?” at the PKP conference in Barcelona on November 21, 2019, highlighting several new resources on the PKP Docs Hub. In this report, we’ll recap what you may have missed and give a sneak peak at what’s in store for 2020.

In September 2019, we announced a code freeze leading up to the release of OJS/OMP 3.2 in what we hoped would be January 2020. Between holding an international conference, the December holidays, and some exciting new advancements, we admittedly got a bit off schedule. We now expect to have this major release completed for the end of February 2020.

This is the third in a series of blogs based on excerpts from an early and ongoing draft of a book (here for comment) in which I develop a case for amending copyright in the United States so that it is once again serving research and scholarship.

Starting with OJS/OMP 3.2, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP)  is moving from version 2 to version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) for its software releases. The software license is a legal document that safeguards free and open source software to keep it free and available to the community that builds it. The GPL is one of the most common free software licenses.

How does software, created nearly twenty years ago at a university in Canada, become one of the world’s most widely used journal publishing platforms? Being free and open source hasn’t hurt the success of Open Journal Systems (OJS), but another major factor has been, and continues to be, the countless volunteers who have translated our software into more than 35 languages.

The PKP 2019 International Scholarly Publishing Conference was held November 20-22, 2019 at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Attended by more than 150 community members from around the world, we’ve enjoyed since then hearing post-conference reflections about the six workshops, five keynotes, and more than 30 presentations that took place.

On behalf of the entire PKP team, I would like to wish our global community a very happy new year and decade. The Public Knowledge Project is poised to contribute much to scholarly publishing this year thanks to the ongoing support of our contributors, sustainers, partners, and granting agencies. Together, we are making knowledge public.

The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) has launched its second funding cycle. We are pleased to announce that PKP is one of three vetted services – along with the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)/Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) and OpenCitations – that has been selected and presented to the SCOSS  international scholarly community for funding.

This is the second in a series of blogs on how U.S. copyright law has, with the emergence of open access to research and scholarship in the digital era, slipped into an unconstitutional state because it can no longer be said, in the case of science, “to promote the progress of science and useful arts” (U.S. CONST. art. 1, § 8, cl.8.). Rather, the law is called upon to constrain such progress.

Couldn’t make it to PKP 2019 this year? No worries! Get the PKP conference experience without leaving your chair! Follow along online November 20-22, 2019 and watch for recordings and updates following.