The Public Knowledge Project is pleased to issue this Call for Proposals for the PKP 2017 International Scholarly Publishing Conference to be held in Montreal, Quebec on August 2, 3, and 4, 2017. The conference will co-hosted by our friends at Érudit, and will take place at the Université de Montréal. Montreal is Canada’s second largest city and has a major international airport making travel easy from most locations.

The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies has launched its new Finnish Scholarly Journals Online platform, a national portal for the best of Finnish scholarship. The site currently features 35 journals covering a broad range of topics, and includes archives going back multiple years.

PKP is pleased to have been invited to join the Advisory Board for the HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure) Project.

Open access subscriptions? Check out John’s latest column on Slaw.ca using historical analysis to point the way to a future alternative: Among those of trying to imagine an alternative economic arrangement for scholarly publishing that will result in public access to research and scholarship, the journal subscription has become seemingly immovable impediment to the wider distribution of this form of intellectual property.

PKP is partnering with the Educopia Institute and others in the Developing a Curriculum to Advance Library-Based Publishing project to create educational materials to support library-based publishers. Applications are now being accepted to develop content in the areas of Policy, Content, Impact, or Sustainability.

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!