On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the Public Knowledge Project is pleased to announce the recent release of its community-driven, research-based Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Monograph Press (OMP), and Open Preprint Systems (OPS). OJS, OMP, and OPS are free and open-source software (FOSS) for independent scholarly journal, press, and preprint publishing.
Version 3.4 introduces a new, friendlier, more accessible author submission process. Authors’ work is auto-saved in case of a network outage, it’s now possible to change important details like submission language and section, and there’s a final review step allowing authors to double-check that everything is complete before they submit.
The statistics toolset has been rewritten with better support for institutional and geographic statistics and facilitating COUNTER R5 compliance. DOI support has also been comprehensively rewritten with the support of Crossref. Whereas previously it was necessary to check several parts of the editorial workflow to work with different kinds of DOIs, it is now possible to use a unified interface for managing these identifiers.
Behind the scenes, the development team has put a lot of energy into updating the codebase to tighten up data management, class loading, and other back-end concerns. These improvements will make it much more pleasant to work with the software as a developer, and permit for the first time the publication of high-quality database schema documentation.
Editors can now use the new step-by-step interface for recording editorial decisions, which includes a new email composer for simplifying email drafting, file attachment, and for using email templates in any language. Submission workflow is also now more intuitive and accessible, thanks to community input and usability tests. Submission titles can now include limited formatting; this long-standing feature request will finally make it easier for journals to include and properly format taxonomical names in titles.
If you are using our successful 3.3.0 LTS (“long-term-support”) line of releases of OJS, OMP, or OPS, don’t worry – we will continue to maintain support for 3.3.0 for several years longer, until there is a new LTS release ready to take its place. If you are able to upgrade more frequently and are interested in the cutting-edge changes introduced in 3.4.0, you are welcome to upgrade. For more details on our release strategies and which is the best path for your organization, please read PKP Announces Long-Term Support (LTS) Software Releases.
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Community-driven and research-based
As a research-based Core-Facility of Simon Fraser University, PKP has a home that helps ensure its software remains FOSS, will never be bought out, and will continue to serve independent publishing, open access, and global reach.
PKP’s software is truly community-driven – OJS, OMP, and OPS 3.4.0 represent more than two years of hard work by the PKP development team, development partners like TIB and SciELO, our community of volunteer translators, testers, sprinters, and more!
If you or your organization is interested in contributing, we invite you to explore partnerships and consider membership on PKP’s website.
