Mark your calendars! PKP is pleased to announce August 31, 2016 as the release date for Open Journal Systems version 3.0. This is the most comprehensive software upgrade since we moved from OJS 1.0 to 2.0 way back in 2005! It incorporates a decade of feedback from our users on the community forum, through usability testing, and through thousands of conversations, feature requests, and helpful critiques.

After 2 months in production, we are now preserving 317 journals in the new PKP Private LOCKSS Network (PLN). Participation in the PKP PLN is free to anyone using PKP’s OJS software (version 2.4.8 or later), and helps to ensure your content is preserved, even in the case of a catastrophic server crash.

As we approach the upcoming OJS 3 release (date soon to be announced), we wanted to share some of the major new features you’ll see, including editorial discussions, flexible workflows and roles, easier theming, and more. All of the critical features and functionality you expect from OJS have been included in the new release, but we are particularly excited about these new additions.

One of our major goals with OJS 3.0 is to deliver an outstanding user experience for our thousands of journals and the many readers, authors, reviewers, editors, and librarians who use them.

Get ready, PKP Sprinters, we’re gearing up for a Fall 2016 Sprint in beautiful Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, on Sunday/Monday October 2-3, 2016. The event will be co-hosted by PKP and our friends at the University of New Brunswick Library. Our previous sprint, in Montreal, was a resounding success (read about the outcomes on the PKP blog) and we hope you will join us for what we are sure will be another fun and productive couple of days.

Did you know that in addition to making free, open source software for scholarly publishing, PKP also writes detailed documentation, both on using our software, but also for improving your publishing practices. Documents like Learning OJS help you with the tools, and Getting Found, Staying Found help you expand your publishing expertise.

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts (here are the first, second, and third) that introduce draft sections of the new OJS 3 documentation, in preparation for the upcoming release later this summer. This time, we’re looking at the copyediting workflow.

PKP’s MacArthur-funded Open Access Publishing Cooperative Study has reached the halfway point in its two year timeline examining cooperation between publishing stakeholder groups.

This is the third in a series of blog posts (the first is here, second here) that introduce draft sections of the new OJS 3 documentation, in preparation for the upcoming release. This time, we’re looking at the review process. Because reviewers, like authors, are often new to the system, we need to make this as easy as we can for them.

I’m delighted to be able to offer a guest blog from Rebecca Kennison. Rebecca is the principal of K|N Consultants and has worked extensively in scholarly publishing. What follows is a remarkably acute analysis of Elsevier’s journal pricing practices that she recently contributed to the Open Scholarship Initiative listserv.

I go to a fair share of conferences and academic events every year (too many, my wife says!), but for the last two years there has been one event that has been a clear favourite of mine—OpenCon. What makes OpenCon stand out is that it is much more than a place for students and early career researchers to learn about Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data.