Applications for OpenCon, an international conference on Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data specifically for students and early career researchers are now available: http://www.opencon2014.org/apply The event will bring together students and early career researchers from across the world to learn about the issues, develop critical skills, and return home ready to catalyze action toward a more open system for sharing the

Since adopting an open access, online-only format in 2012, with its workflow managed via OJS , the South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science (SAJLIS) has enjoyed almost a doubling of manuscript submissions.

PKP’s founder and director John Willinsky was recently interviewed by Editage Insights, a one-stop, cross-discipline learning and knowledge-sharing portal for academics, researchers, journals, and research publication professionals.

Curious what the PKP team has been working on this week? The PKP Roundup gives quick updates on our latest software developments. OJS Stable line (2.4.x): We reviewed the bug entries that are still open for OJS 2.4.5, and work is being done on those. OJS 2.4.5 is still scheduled for release at the end of August.

Open source, open science, open data, open access, open education, open learning — PKPs John Willinsky and Kevin Stranack are working with international partners to offer an innovative new course for anyone in the world (not for credit, no charge, via Stanford’s Open EdX platform). Have a look at our (short) promo video.

The Accelerating Science Award Program recently recognized three recipients for exemplary reuse of Open Access research. This program was co-sponsored by PLOS, Google, Wellcome Trust, and numerous other organizations. A major component of the program was the Accelerating Impact portfolio, which highlighted both the contributions of the finalists and the benefits of Open Access.

With the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; the American Anthropological Association (AAA), Freie Universität Berlin, and the Public Knowledge Project will work together to enhance OJS to better support online book reviews. The new functionality will build on the work done by FU Berlin, who provided the original iteration of the Objects for Review plugin.

Curious what the PKP team has been working on this week? The PKP Roundup gives quick updates on our latest software developments . In the midst of summer, development has been moving along but with no major updates. We are looking at a minor OMP release (1.1.1) within a couple weeks, with a possible release of OMP 1.2 in October (depending on our UI/UX work). OJS 2.4.5 is scheduled for release at the end of August.

PKP has been developing user interfaces for over a decade, but we are now implementing a more formal process that will involve greater transparency, cross-team collaboration, and user involvement, resulting in visibly higher quality software.

The OJS usage statistics have been updated: according to our latest numbers, there were 7021 journals using Open Journal Systems (OJS) available online at the beginning of 2014. The statistics can be found here, with a map here. We are aware that some journals are not being picked up when generating these statistics, and we are actively working towards improving our method.

Our software, Open Journal Systems, has been designed to make it easy and inexpensive to put scholarly content online, free of charge to readers. OJS, now used by over 6000 journals has been PKP’s major contribution to a movement that seeks to change scholarly communications by increasing access to research and scholarship everywhere. However, we understand that change requires more than just software.