In these extraordinary times of the pandemic, unusual steps must be taken to protect the public interest. On March 25, 2020, the Government of Canada’s sweeping COVID-19 Emergency Response Act received royal assent.

In January of 2017, PKP Director John Willinsky proposed “subscribing to open access” as a concept for flipping journals to open access with the full and continuing support of their subscribing libraries. Later that year, the concept was initiated by Annual Reviews under the moniker “subscribe to open” (S20), with a full pilot of five journals launched in 2019.

Thank you to everyone who attended our Annual General Meeting (AGM) on July 24, 2020. A recording of this event is now available and includes both the presentation slides and audio. We want to hear from you! What do you think about our membership and development plans? How do we set priorities together? If you have questions or feedback about our presentation, please post a comment on the PKP Community Forum.

Is your journal free of charge to both readers and authors? Does it follow the “diamond model?” If yes, OPERAS needs your help!

We are pleased to present our 2019 annual report to the community. This year, we look back at our top stories from the 2019-2020 fiscal year while exploring what being open means to this project: open access, open source, open infrastructure. We also reflect on how our dedicated community has made, and keeps us, open.

I am working this year on developing a copyright amendment that is intended to do a much better job of supporting open access to research than the current law. This work is catching something of the tailwind filling the sails of open science, brought on by tragic, disruptive turns of the global pandemic.

The global scale of the current pandemic has led to what feels like a remarkably unprecedented level of solidarity in a world pulling together (while standing apart) amid this common cause of fighting the spread of Covid-19. In the area in which I work (from home) of scholarly communication, publishers have been not only creating public access to Covid-19 collections of research and professional resources, from Elsevier’s COVID-19 Clinical

Over the past few months, PKP’s Documentation Interest Group (DIG) has been largely focused on two key areas: updates to documentation for Open Journal Systems (OJS) 3.2 and translation workflows. Our thanks to documentation sprinters and contributors for their ongoing work and support.

The Public Knowledge Project’s (PKP) 2020 Annual General Meeting (AGM) will be held Friday, July 24, 2020 from 12:00PM-1:00PM PDT. This is a free, online event open to everyone.    What does it mean to be open? Open infrastructure? Open source? Join the PKP team as we unpack what it means to us to be truly open. We’ll reflect back on the year gone by and share some exciting new plans for 2020-2021.

It’s time to upgrade! PKP is pleased to announce the release of OJS, OMP, and OPS 3.2.1. With this release, Open Preprint Systems (OPS) is officially out of beta, joining Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Open Monograph Press (OMP) in our regular release and support cycle.  Since the release of OJS/OMP/OPS 3.2 in February 2020, our development team has been busy tackling several small fixes to frequently encountered problems.

As post-secondary instructors adapt to providing online instruction for the foreseeable future, many are looking for new ways to engage with students in an online environment. Course journal projects, using Open Journal Systems (OJS), can offer one such opportunity. Course journal projects are an example of open pedagogy: open educational practices that involve students as producers, rather than just consumers, of knowledge.