Back in August, we launched a five-part series aptly named “Five Reasons Why” to entice participants from around the world to attend PKP 2019, our 7th International Scholarly Publishing Conference at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) November 20-22, 2019. With just one week left until registration ends on November 15, we present not only our final reason, but some exciting activities for those already registered.

We’ve made it official. Crossref is now a PKP Strategic Partner. We’ve known each other for years but only just started getting serious. Ours is a love story built on mutual respect for DOI’s and metadata.

As we traditionally do with our bi-annual conferences, PKP 2019 will kick off with an OJS/OMP development sprint. We invite you to spend the whole week with us, starting with this free interactive event November 18-19, 2019 at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Can’t make it to the conference? No problem! Conference registration is not required to participate. Ready to register? Sign up here for the UAB Sprint.

Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, has awarded a grant of $165,000 to John Willinsky, Khosla Family Professor at Stanford University Graduate School of Education, and director of the Public Knowledge Project.

Do you host Open Journal Systems (OJS) and/or Open Monograph Press (OMP) as a library publisher, academic press, or institution? If so, you’ll know that the server that hosts the software can have a major impact on how users experience your journals or press.

Managing an OJS journal and need back office support? PKP has joined forces with Open Academia, a Swedish-based publishing service provider, to bring OJS journals editorial support, production editing, and OJS 3 website design. This important partnership enables both organizations to work together to develop the necessary infrastructure and support for our shared clients. Together, we are making independent publishing a viable option.

In 1998, John Willinsky set out on a mission to make knowledge public – to reduce the barriers he and his students were facing in trying to access academic research. The solution, he found, was in open source software. Open Journal Systems (OJS), our flagship software, followed as a free, open source solution to facilitate this goal.

PKP announces today OJS and OMP 3.2 will be released in January 2020. To allow adequate time for testing, translation, plugin, and documentation updates, all new features will be frozen on November 1, 2019. During this freeze, until the new release, we will be conducting bug fixes in response to testing, but not adding new code.

Summer is almost over north of the equator, but before it’s gone, a shout-out to our friends at the University of Pittsburgh’s University Library System (ULS) team. On July 29-31, 2019, ULS hosted their first PKP sprint. The free, three-day event was attended by 17 participants comprised of PKP community members and staff.

The jurisdiction in which it makes the most sense to reform copyright law so that it supports, rather than deters, access to research and scholarship is the United States.

Do you work for a library, publisher, or department specializing in scholarly communications? Are you part of an organization or research team that supports scholarly publishing?