Community Contributions

The Public Knowledge Project welcomes community contributions of code to our software, in the form of:

Developers are free to contact the PKP Development Team on the Development Forum noted above, or by clicking Contact Us.

OJS, OCS, and the PKP Harvester are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

CJC contributes to the OJS software

The Canadian Journal of Communication was an early adopter of online publishing. We had back issues of our journal on the web as early at 1994. At first we did our own web development, but the software grew more and more complex, and our ability to support it couldn't keep up. As well, we had no or limited "back end" to our system. Our software was mainly about presenting finished articles to the reader, and not helpful to the submission, review, revision, and release process. We decided to move to OJS very early on, and were attracted to the fact that it was open source, so we could extend and enhance it in ways that suited us.

At first we made those enhancements on our own, but based on my own research into the benefits of open source community software development, I encouraged our developers to get in touch with the team at OJS and we quickly found that we had much in common. Not only that, but some of our priorities were not priorties for the OJS at the time (subscriptions, for example). So, we developed code that provided enhancements that we needed, but we did so in a way that would allow them to be included in the *main* code for the project. Over the years we have submitted many small (bug fix) and large (the subscriptions module) pieces to the code, all the while keeping our overall software and development costs WAY below what they were before we went with the OJS software. In fact, we have a system with three times the functionality and our software cost is less than one third what it used to be. And with our code submissions, OJS still feels like "our" system.

Recently OJS has moved to a modular format and created a plug-in architecture. We believe that this will greatly increase both the number of code submissions but also the quality and diversity of those submissions. Our group has recently completed to plug-ins, one for a noticeboard and one for accepting thesis abstracts as a publication type. We're working on revising our existing RSS feed code (which we have working on version 1.x of OJS) and making that available for OJS 2.x in the near future.

I strongly encourage anyone who has an inclination toward software development, or has access to software programming expertise, and who wants to get involved, to contact the team at PKP, learn about the process for developing plug-ins, and get started building a better OJS for the entire community. If you need a feature it is likely someone else does, too, so why not share the load? That's what open source is all about! Even if you aren't a coder, you can contribute to the project by translating menu items and help screens: we've got many more languages to go.