1. Continuing Open Source Publishing Software Development
PKP’s open source software, distributed at no charge to users, goes through a continuous cycle of improvement with frequent releases, based on the needs and sometimes the contributed code of its growing user community. Open Conference Systems Version 2 was recently released, and is a major rebuild based on the advances made with Open Journals Systems.

2. Creating New Reading Environments for Scholarly Work
PKP is experimenting with ways to improve the online reading environment for research and scholarship for a wide range of readers through the use of “reading tools,” which connect what’s being read to related research, media reports, and government materials, providing a context for critical engagement, with studies underway involving policymakers, humanities scholars, high school teachers, college students, and members of the public.

3. Synergies: the Canadian Information Network for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities
The Synergies initiative will create a national network for the production, storage, and access to digitized knowledge, including peer-reviewed journal articles, datasets, theses, conference proceedings, and scholarly books produced in Canada. OJS will play a major support role in Synergies, being used by four of the five principal Synergies partners. Synergies recently received $12 million in funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).

4. Intellectual Properties of Learning: Medieval Monasticism
This phase of a larger historical study on learning’s intellectual properties considers the extent to which the institutional properties of medieval monasticism – including its asceticism, literacy, communal property, and endowment – contributed to the Western concept of intellectual property in association with learning and the learned and did so in ways that has a particular legacy for current conceptions of research and scholarship as learned activities that lead to the production of distinctly situated, in a legal and economic sense, intellectual properties.

5. Toward an Ideal PDF for the Scholarly Article
Recent doubts about the continued utility of the Portable Document Format (PDF) as the lowest common denominator of scholarly communications have surfaced a surprising many PDF capabilities that have been underused or virtually ignored by scholarly publishers in the past decade. While we believe that PDF's successor(s) may, and should, arrive sooner than the community expects, the PDF will remain dominant for the foreseeable future. Toward an Ideal PDF for the Scholarly Article is a research and design effort to re-enliven electronic publishing, in the hopes that our near-term solutions will serve as a high benchmark for the scholarly document format of the future. This work includes a focus on improving the aesthetic layout of the PDF in accordance with active research into academic reading behaviour and efficiency, as well as standardizing PDF metadata delivery to support new methods of citation and discoverability.

6. Strengthening African Research Culture and Capacities
With over 250 African journals using PKP software to list their contents in the African Journals Online program, PKP will be conducting Online Scholarly Publishing workshops in 6-8 African research libraries on the feasibility of moving journal to online management and full-text publishing as a way to strengthen local research culture and knowledge building.

7. Toward an Intellectual History of Publishing
Current focus is on the implications of John Locke’s theory of property for intellectual property rights and responsibilities within the “commonwealth of learning,” as it relates to current levels of access to scholarly work and to student’s lack of experience with such property in the schools given the increasing emphasis on standardized testing. Previous work on this theme has been done on the Oxford English Dictionary, Leibniz, and Newton.

8. Assessing and Improving the Impact and Reach of Open Access Latin American Scholarly Production. Latin America produces more Open Access research than any other region in the world. The scholarly production of Latin America is estimated at above 70% Open Access, with some experts claiming that it approximates 97-99% Open Access. However, while the extent of OA has been partially documented, the causes and effects of such openness has not. In particular, the effects on the overall quality of Latin American research, as well as on its reach or uptake, are little known. This research program aims to look closely at the nature of the openness, the degree and type of access, the languages and venues used for dissemination, and the usage patterns of the research itself. By systematically describing the implications associated with this openness along these and other dimensions, others will be able learn from the unprecedented and unique OA experiment taking place in Latin America today.