OJS 3.1.2 Released

By Marisa MacDonald

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is pleased to announce the release of Open Journal Systems (OJS) 3.1.2. We would like to thank the PKP community, including support from our global network of sustainers, developers, and publishing clients, for making this update possible. This release includes minor bug fixes and enhancements as well as several new features.

As an open source project, PKP’s software development is ongoing – our work is never done. Priorities are identified for each new release based on user needs, resource availability, and complexity.

Community Priorities

OJS is used worldwide in multiple languages. Perhaps one of the most notable community priorities addressed in 3.1.2 relates to this international use. Author name conventions are now much improved to better support multilingual names and different name conventions. First and last name are no longer required fields, and authors can now clearly articulate their preferred public name.

Our community also asked for the following, now included in 3.1.2:

  • Reduce the number of submission notification emails for editors.
  • Upgrade to Smarty 3.
  • Facilitate attachments to editorial decision messages.

Further, our user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) testing brought about two key changes:

  • One click review access by default.
  • Contextual information for submission list icons.

Sponsored Development

Through our Publishing Services division (PKP|PS), PKP supports sponsored development. In OJS 3.1.2 this work included two major new features. The first, developed with Cultural Anthropology for their journal (which just upgraded to OJS 3 in February), enables journal editors to assemble published articles into thematic collections, which provides the journal with a larger opportunity to contextualise their content outside of the traditional table of contents structure.

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Secondly, we have added an exciting new statistics visualization framework. This work was sponsored by the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing Services who host their journals with PKP|PS and have been visionary in their desire to provide new tools and functionality to their editors. OJS 3.1.2 can now display chart and graph representations of article usage, including refinement by date and journal section, author name, and submission. This work is based upon underlying improvements to the OJS API, and we expect to deliver more attractive and useful reports to editors, authors and the public over time.

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More Information

Check out the complete list of updates on our official GitHub account: https://github.com/pkp/ojs/blob/master/docs/release-notes/README-3.1.2.

To download OJS 3.1.2, please see: http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs_download.

Want to help make OJS better? There are many ways individuals and institutions can contribute to the development of PKP’s open source software. PKP is not a commercial enterprise and as such, credit our success (and future) to you – our community of users. Contact us to learn more.

 

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