Earlier this year, PKP Managing Director Kevin Stranack moved to Prince George, British Columbia, Canada – 770km due north of PKP’s administrative home at Simon Fraser University (SFU) Library in Burnaby (near Vancouver). While he’s leaving behind some big shoes to fill, we’re thrilled to report he’s not leaving PKP altogether. Here, from Kevin, is the scoop.
Having a reliable digital preservation strategy is recommended best practice in scholarly publishing. The PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN) was created to meet this need, but regrettably, has yet to work reliably in OJS 3 environments. Accordingly, we have not yet launched OJS 3 support. We recognize the inconvenience this has created for journals and wish to apologize for both the delay and silence to date. So what went wrong?
The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is honoured at the receipt of a major pledge, part of the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services’ (SCOSS) second funding cycle. The French National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) announced today its support for PKP in the amount of €75,000 over three years (10% of our target amount under SCOSS).
I’ve got blog-worthy good news. So good, in fact, that I’m persuaded to take a break from my consecutive blogs on amending American copyright for open access (my developing case here). Instead, I devote this blog to a far more here-and-now breakthrough in increasing public access to research.
Our preprints story continues with a guest post by SciELO. In addition to seed funding to make Open Preprint Systems (OPS) possible, SciELO is working closely with the PKP team to make sure that the software is developed and maintained following state-of-the-art best practices and that its features satisfy the needs of a diverse community.
The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is pleased to announce the arrival of our latest major releases. Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Open Monograph Press (OMP) 3.2 are now available to download. With this release we are also launching a new addition to the PKP software suite, Open Preprint Systems (OPS), in beta.
“It no longer makes sense to seek further manipulation of fair use’s legal concessions and the trade-offs of open access policies. It is time, rather, to amend the law.” John Willinsky In 2019, PKP founder and director John Willinsky was awarded a grant from the Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, to investigate the potential of copyright reform in support of open access.
Our story begins in February 2017 when SciELO first announced their quest for a preprint server. Like many circa 2016, SciELO was coming around to the idea that preprints could and would serve an important part in their strategy for open science. But despite a clear vision and path to get there, SciELO was missing an important piece: infrastructure.
The release of OJS/OMP 3.2 is right around the corner. If your institution has written custom themes or plugins, your technical staff may need to make changes to the code which runs your journals and presses before you update. To help, we’ve prepared a Release Notebook for 3.2 that provides technical guidance on changes that will impact software developers, plugin and theme authors, and anyone who works with the application’s codebase.
Since the last Documentation Interest Group (DIG) update, PKP contributors have been very busy. Kaitlin Newson (Chair, PKP Members Committee and DIG) filled us in with “What’s New with Documentation?” at the PKP conference in Barcelona on November 21, 2019, highlighting several new resources on the PKP Docs Hub. In this report, we’ll recap what you may have missed and give a sneak peak at what’s in store for 2020.
In September 2019, we announced a code freeze leading up to the release of OJS/OMP 3.2 in what we hoped would be January 2020. Between holding an international conference, the December holidays, and some exciting new advancements, we admittedly got a bit off schedule. We now expect to have this major release completed for the end of February 2020.