During the Fall 2017 PKP Sprint event in Montreal, one of the groups decided to focus on improving the current user experience of the Open Typesetting Stack, the OJS3 Open Typesetting Stack plugin, and the Texture WYSIWYG editor used by the Open Typesetting Stack.

At the 2017 PKP Sprint, the Documentation Update and Architecture group worked on a prospective Roadmap for Updating PKP Documentation, aiming to solve broader issues related to the organisation, redundancy, and hosting of distributed documentation across all PKP software.

Special thanks to this group’s participants: Mark Jordan and Dimitris Efstathiou During the PKP 2017 Conference Sprint Sessions, one of the tasks we decided to work on was the development of a process which, given a natively exported OJS 2.x XML file, the OJS 3.x natively exported XML file is being created.

During the 2017 PKP Conference Sprint, our group was responsible to propose enhancements and improvements to the internal workflow statistics of OJS. Our group included Juan Pablo Alperin, Alex Mendonça, Israel Cefrin, Joelle Hatem and had collaborations from Alice Meadows and Ina Smith. The problem Journal editors often have a hard time extracting internal statistics from OJS.

Participants in the Book / Documentation sprint group included: Kenton Good, Andrea Pritt, Jennifer Chan, Jordan Cloutier, Sonya Betz, Mariya Maistrovskaya, Ali Moore, Dana McFarland, Suzanne Jay, Andrea Kosavic, Olga Perkovic, Jeanette Hatherill, Bronwen Sprout, and Roger Gillis.

One of the new and exciting feature being released with OJS 3.1 is the REST API. This innovation has the potential to unlock several new opportunities for OJS users. The API will offer great flexibility and ease OJS integration with other platforms.

Special thanks to this group’s participants: Angus F., Sophy O., Alec S., and Ilyass T. During the sprint event at the PKP 2017 International Scholarly Publishing Conference, we formed a small subgroup to introduce OJS 3.x coding by working on a small real-world feature addition. This also illustrates a typical way in which a feature gets added to our software organizationally based on a user request, beginning with our support forum.

Thanks again to everyone that was able to join us in Montreal for the PKP 2017 International Scholarly Publishing Conference and Development Sprint. When we held our first conference back in 2007, we had no idea it would still be going strong a decade later. Our partners at Erudit were amazing hosts, ensuring the best venues, food, drink, and entertainment that we could have hoped for.

The recent announcement of Elsevier’s acquisition of bepress has generated considerable discussion in the library community, especially by those responsible for providing institutional repository and scholarly publishing services at their institutions. It has also resulted in many questions about Open Journal Systems (OJS) as an alternative option for library publishing programs.

PKP is pleased to announce it has entered into a strategic relationship with the mission driven non-profit Impactstory. PKP and Impactstory are excited to work together to support the adoption of open source software that enables a more open and diverse environment of scholarly activities.

New to sprinting? Not a coder? Not to worry — there is something for everyone at a PKP sprint. PKP sprints typically focus on rapid code development for our open source publishing applications, with small, self-organized teams working together to solve common software issues or make enhancements that will benefit everyone.