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!

With the launch of OMP 1.2 (April 2016) and OJS 3.0 (August 2016) behind us, we are making plans for future releases, and the associated functionality that will be included with each new one. You can see a detailed list of releases and issues on our github milestones page.

Special thanks to this group’s participants: Brian C, Antti K, Kassim M, and Alec S! During the Fall 2016 PKP Sprint event in Fredericton, New Brunswick, one of the tasks we decided to work on was the development of a REST API for OJS 3.0. REST APIs are a perennial favourite subject — we’ve worked on this before at past events, and spoken with numerous users and partners in order to gather requirements for what the API should cover.