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.

PKP is pleased to be holding the 2017 sprint in Montreal, immediately preceding the PKP Conference, co-hosted with Érudit at the University of Montreal. The format will be, as always, in an unconference style, and we invite you to propose topics of interest that you would be willing to lead during the sprint. On the morning of the first day, participants will collectively review all proposals and determine topics to proceed with.

Lauren Maggio, Laura Moorhead, Juan Alperin, and I recently blogged a small study on the relationship between health journalism and biomedical research in the digital age of growing open access to research. We scraped those news stories in 2016 that had “cancer” in their headlines and included a link to a research article. The good news is that 67,236 news stories on cancer had such links to 11,523 different journal articles.

The Sixth International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference is in less than one month, and we couldn’t be more excited. If you’ve already registered, we’re looking forward to seeing you soon. If you haven’t yet registered, it’s not too late! We still have a few available spaces: click to register now.    Still undecided?

Finding in-person publishing classes can be a challenge, as is fitting them into your busy schedule. Fortunately, a number of organizations make recordings of their webinars freely available.

Thanks again to Sonya Betz of the University of Alberta Libraries for leading another valuable round of UX testing for OJS 3 — and of course to all of our volunteer testers for taking the time to help us improve our software for everyone. In this latest round, we focused on some new developments to improve the list of submissions the editors see when they login to the system.

As part of our ongoing strategic planning process, we’re pleased to release our 2017 – 2021 Strategy. This document has been in development for the past 6 months, going through an extensive process of community consultation and revision.