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.

This is the third in a series of blogs based on excerpts from an early and ongoing draft of a book (here for comment) in which I develop a case for amending copyright in the United States so that it is once again serving research and scholarship.

Starting with OJS/OMP 3.2, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP)  is moving from version 2 to version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) for its software releases. The software license is a legal document that safeguards free and open source software to keep it free and available to the community that builds it. The GPL is one of the most common free software licenses.

How does software, created nearly twenty years ago at a university in Canada, become one of the world’s most widely used journal publishing platforms? Being free and open source hasn’t hurt the success of Open Journal Systems (OJS), but another major factor has been, and continues to be, the countless volunteers who have translated our software into more than 35 languages.

The PKP 2019 International Scholarly Publishing Conference was held November 20-22, 2019 at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Attended by more than 150 community members from around the world, we’ve enjoyed since then hearing post-conference reflections about the six workshops, five keynotes, and more than 30 presentations that took place.