Early registration is now open for PKP 2019, our Seventh International Scholarly Publishing Conference November 20-22, 2019 at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). We’re very excited for this year’s conference, which is shaping up to be an exciting week of events in beautiful Barcelona.

Mark your calendars! The PKP 2019 Annual General Meeting will be held on Thursday, July 25, 2019 . This free, online event is open to everyone. Meet our team, find out what we’ve been up to, and get a sneak peak at OJS coming attractions. Date: July 25, 2019 Time: 12pm-1pm PDT URL: https://zoom.us/j/795444902* Registration is not required.

During the first week of June this year, Canada’s Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology issued its Statutory Review of the Copyright Act Report, after an exhaustive and expensive Canada-wide polling of opinion. The result of a legislated five-year review of copyright, the report’s first recommendation is to strike this review mandate from the legislation.

We are pleased to announce that 4Science, part of the Itway Group, has joined PKP as a strategic partner. Though not a new friendship, we are thrilled to formalize this partnership. Increased collaboration and sharing will enable us to better serve OJS communities around the world. PKP met the 4Science team long before it was established in 2015. In fact, we’ve been working together for many years.

Internal statistics in OJS are crucial to improve editorial workflow management. These metrics (e.g., the number of submissions in the system, average time to review, acceptance rates, etc.) support internal evaluations, facilitate account reporting to funding agencies, and enable users to report on a journal’s readership and editorial performance.

Over the past few sprints, UI/UX (user interface and user experience) has become an increasingly important and popular topic. Our SFU Sprint in May 2019 was no different. At this event, a team was formed to look at UI/UX issues, specifically, the manuscript submission workflow in the yet-to-be-released OJS 3.2. To learn more, we chatted with PKP staffer and UI/UX expert, Israel Cefrin.

At the SFU Sprint in Vancouver last month, a small group of Crossref staff, PKP staff, and some library community members met to review the latest OJS (3.1.2) Crossref plugin. Just ten days prior, PKP and Crossref had a meeting to discuss the formation of a working group that would help address some of the issues OJS users have engaging with their Crossref membership.

Open Journal Systems (OJS 3) has been translated into 28 languages. Used by more than 90 countries around the world, it truly is an international system. Translation has – and continues to be – of utmost importance. Here we rely heavily on our community for support. At our SFU Sprint in May 2019, one team offered just that. Specifically, they looked at how to better serve journal editors working in multiple languages.

Are you a software developer using OJS and/or OMP? Need help building themes, writing plugins, or developing new features? If so, help has arrived. PKP is excited to announce the launch of our Developer Documentation (aka Developer Docs). This new site is part of the PKP Docs Hub, our home for all PKP user guides. Technical users can now find all our developer guides compiled together in a hub of their own.

Motivated by upcoming legislation in the Canadian province of Ontario, our second SFU Sprint report comes from our accessibility group. Sprinters set the bar high and completed two very important projects: (1) a roadmap to achieve Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA accessibility of the OJS platform; and (2) a draft module for a PKP School course to help content creators ensure that their scholarly outputs are accessible.

Our first report from the SFU Sprint May 6-7, 2019 covers three topics, all related to OJS documentation: email templates, plugins, and upgrading. As an affiliated event with the Library Publishing Forum, we welcomed a large number of library professionals to the table, many seeking to work on non-technical projects. Documentation was by far one of the most popular.