Summer is almost over north of the equator, but before it’s gone, a shout-out to our friends at the University of Pittsburgh’s University Library System (ULS) team. On July 29-31, 2019, ULS hosted their first PKP sprint. The free, three-day event was attended by 17 participants comprised of PKP community members and staff. Sprinters took part in a variety of technical and non-technical tasks aimed at improving and enhancing Open Journal Systems (OJS) and Open Monograph Press (OMP).

Tasks and sprinters were organized into working groups inspired by topics (problems, interests, curiosities) crowd sourced on Day 1:

• User experience/user interface (UI/UX) testing for OJS 3.2;
• Translation documentation and tools;
• Accessibility tests in OJS 3;
• In-app OJS help and tool-tips;
• Metadata quality control;
• REST-API for OMP; 
• XML documentation to support conversion tools and JATS integration; and
• Improvements to the PKP Community Forum.

Clinton Graham, Systems Developer at the ULS and Chair of the PKP Technical Committee, shared the following about his experience:

“Highlights for me included seeing a diversity of expertise in collaboration, creating connections both during the work and after hours. Discussions of exposing traditional and non-traditional scholarship output in novel and alternative front-end presentations were among the most intriguing and forward-thinking efforts.”

Thank you to the following organizations for their participation: University Heidelberg (Germany); Journal of World-Systems Research; Syracuse University School of Architecture (USA); Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte (USA); Atla (USA); and Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas (Columbia). And thank you to the mighty University Pittsburgh ULS staff for hosting a diverse, collaborative, productive, and well-organized gathering of OJS and OMP users.   

To learn more about PKP Sprints, check out our Sprints page. Next stop? We’re heading to Barcelona November 18-22, 2019 for PKP 2019, our International Scholarly Publishing Conference. Stay tuned to our website and social media for announcements and registration.