We're proud to announce the availability of a brand-new, comprehensive and fully up-to-date OJS Userguide: Open Journal Systems: A Complete Guide to Online Publishing. The Userguide is available in both HTML and PDF on the OJS Documentation page.

When you plan to use DOI, HANDLE, PURL or any other link resolver for your articles then please consider the following thread on Google's Webmaster forum.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7bdfa71c272ed8c1&hl=en

As you can read, there may be an impact on your ranking on the general Google index. Your ranking on Google Scholar will probably not be impacted.

We are happy to announce that the OJS stable release (2.2.x) is now part of the Debian Linux distribution:

<http://packages.debian.org/sid/ojs>

This means that OJS will be part of the upcoming Debian squeeze release and of the next Ubuntu release (Maverick).

We believe that this is an important step to make OJS even easier to access, install and update.

Bought an iPad yet? If you have, take a look at some of your favourite OJS journals and see how nicely they display!

OJS continues to grow! We've been tracking OJS installations, filtering out tests and demos, and have found at least 5700 installations from around the world as of this month:

OJS          Date
2465       01/01/2009
3216       01/04/2009
4096       01/07/2009
4641       01/10/2009
5166       01/01/2010

Congratulations to the African Journal of Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicines (AJTCAM) for their successful inclusion in Pubmed Central. It is a great achievement and reflects the high quality of their work.

We'd be very interested to hear from any other OJS journals that have had similar success with PMC or any other indexing services.

Be sure to check out "New Journals, Free Online, Let Scholars Speak Out", a great new article in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"He seems genial, but John Willinsky is a dangerous man."

John Willinsky and Brian Edgar have conducted a survey of 998 scholarly journals using OJS, capturing "the characteristics of an emerging class of scholar-publisher open access journals (with some representation from more traditional scholarly society and print-based titles)".

You can read the pre-publication version here, and the published version will soon be available from the Scholarly and Research Communication.

We have updated the "Journals Using Open Journal Systems by Continent" map for January 2010, with over 5000 known journals included.

It provides an interesting look at where the software is being used. The work of African Journals Online has had a strong influence in Africa, and we're looking forward to continued growth through our ongoing partnerships in Asia, Latin America, and the rest of the world.

Our friends at the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning have long supported MP3 versions of articles on their OJS journal site, but I see they have now added both EPUB (for ebooks) and Elluminate Recording (for online presentations) formats to their resources. Their leadership is inspiring!