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.

In celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), PKP’s newly formed Accessibility Interest Group shares an update on what PKP is doing to improve the accessibility of Open Journal Systems – and what authors, editors and publishers need to know to do their part as well. The PKP Accessibility Interest Group (AIG) held its first meeting on March 17, 2020.

As one who built a life around books (with them around me), this is my day. April 23rd. World Book and Copyright Day.

In our third and final post in our “Road to Preprints” series, we’re chatting with PKP Associate Director of Research Juan Pablo Alperin to learn more about the Preprint Uptake and Use Project, a joint research initiative between ASAPBIo and the ScholCommLab that turned disappointing data into a metadata mission.

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.