Strengthening multilingual publishing, metadata integrity, and integrating invitation-based roles and reviewers.
December 2025 marks the conclusion of the three-year CRAFT-OA development project, aimed at building core features and improvements for PKP’s software platforms, namely Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Monograph Press (OMP), and Open Preprint Systems (OPS).
These features and enhancements strengthen Diamond Open Access systems, ensuring global visibility, discoverability, and recognition of valuable research, regardless of origin.
These updates fall into three categories:
- Allowing editors to work with user and reviewer data in a GDPR-compliant manner
- Improving access to multilingual content and metadata
- Increasing metadata quality and availability
“The close collaboration between the TIB technical team, PKP development team, and the broader PKP community proved critical in balancing regulatory requirements, technical feasibility, and user-centered design goals.”
— Dulip Withanage, Open Access Platform Manager (TIB)
GDPR-compliant Invitations for Users and Reviewers
Developed by Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) in partnership with PKP
Inviting new users, inviting existing users to adopt a new role, and inviting users to participate in a submission’s review process will all be integrated and be General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant with the upcoming release of OJS, OMP, and OPS 3.6 in the Fall of 2026.
In fact, the recent 3.5 release already includes functionality allowing new user and role invitations to be sent through the software and created by the invitation recipient, taking user account creation out of the hands of the journal manager.
Updating the PKP software platforms to this invitation-based role creation meets the GDPR standards, provides academic publishers with enhanced security, and improves the user experience for authors, reviewers, and editors.
For more information, see:
- PKP Turin 2024 Sprint: GDPR
- GitHub:
“The CRAFT-OA work made OJS more responsive to the realities of multilingual publishing — especially for smaller languages. The next step is to carry that inclusiveness into the broader open-access infrastructure, so that diversity isn’t lost once content leaves the journal platform.”
– Antti-Jussi Nygård, The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies
Multilingualism Enhancements
Developed by The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) in partnership with PKP
Language-specific URLs for Improved Discoverability
Prior to 3.5, the selection of the current language presented when reading a journal, monograph, or preprint was stored via cookies and was hidden from web crawlers and search engines. Unique URLs per language allow for a wider distribution of content to systems consuming data, and improve content accessibility.
Unique URLs for languages allow screen readers to make explicit language declarations and help ensure correct pronunciation. They also allow users who use assistive technologies to reliably navigate to their desired language with minimal interaction.
Search engines will be able to index language-specific content separately. The downstream impact includes the ability for repositories, aggregators, and indexers to directly harvest language-specific content and increase precision for shared content, citation references, etc.
For more information, see:
- CRAFT-OA Brings Multilingual Improvements to OJS 3.5
- GitHub
- Language-specific URLS for improved discoverability #699
“Making sure these external infrastructures can recognize, display, and exchange multilingual metadata is key to ensuring that smaller languages remain visible and valued in global scholarly communication.”
– Antti-Jussi Nygård, The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies
Decoupling the Metadata Language from the Journal Interface
Starting with version 3.5, metadata language options are independent of the journal’s interface language. For example, an author submitting to an English-language journal can select from over 700 languages for their metadata. This is especially valuable for smaller journals publishing multilingual content.
Conversely, the journal interface can be localized (navigation, buttons, content) without impacting the scholarly content in its original language.
This also allows the metadata of past submissions to be updated, even if the journal’s website language is removed.
For more information, see:
- CRAFT-OA Brings Multilingual Improvements to OJS 3.5
- GitHub:
- Make submission language and metadata forms separate from website language settings #9425
Viewing and Editing the Submission Language
Prior to 3.5, editors were unable to edit or view a publication’s language selection and submission locale. If the wrong submission language were selected, resulting in, for example, system notifications in a non-submission language and an incorrect editor assignment, it would not be possible for an editor to correct it.
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Beginning with the 3.5 release, the submission language is prominently displayed and is editable by editors, resulting in a consistent workflow, communication, and improved support for multilingual journals.
For more information, see:
- Display and allow changes to submission language #5502
“CRAFT-OA demonstrates (in practice) that international collaboration for the collective construction of infrastructure is not only possible but beneficial for all parties, and I hope that this experience will serve as an example for new projects so that, from the local level, we can build global infrastructure together.”
— Marc Bria, PKP Technical Committee & Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Improving Metadata Quality and Availability
Keyword and Subject Vocabularies
Developed by The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) in partnership with PKP
The ability to define keywords according to a fixed vocabulary has been added to the 3.5 release, in addition to the free-form text values in earlier releases. This possibility offers several benefits, including standardization of vocabularies and the ability to store identifiers and sources.
The body of work published by the OJS, OMP, and OPS user community is too diverse in field, language, and approach for a single vocabulary to be feasible. To support this diversity, custom vocabularies can be defined using plugins. Two such plugins are already available: the Frascati subject classification, and the YSO ontology.
For more information, see:
- CRAFT-OA Brings Multilingual Improvements to OJS 3.5
- GitHub:
- Allow a journal to define a limited set of allowed keywords and reviewer interests #1550
Contributor Recognition via CRediT
Developed by The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) in partnership with PKP
The upcoming 3.6 release will introduce the CRediT contributor role and degree of contribution as core functionality. For example, a role such as Writing – Review & Editing has the option to be associated with degrees of contribution. For example, lead, equal, or supporting.
Whereas currently OJS handles all contributors as individuals, this update allows the system to recognize three contributor types: individuals, groups, and anonymous, resulting in increased accuracy of representation and well-formed and compliant metadata.
For more information, see:
- GitHub
Data Citations
Developed by The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) in partnership with PKP
The addition of data citations to the 3.6 release includes a data availability statement open-text field and the ability to reference authors and associated datasets.
The data availability statement field allows authors the option to describe their compliance with the journal’s data policies, and if included, it will be published as part of the article.
In addition to promoting research transparency, the inclusion of data citations makes the reuse of data possible and ensures recognition of authors and contributors.
For more information, see:
Automatic Metadata Validation via Crossref
Developed by Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) in partnership with PKP
Improvements to the Crossref plugin for the OJS 3.6 include error handling to highlight incomplete or invalid data, and preventing such data from being sent to Crossref.
Another update to the plugin includes the validation of a publication’s metadata against Crossref’s requirements.
These automatic checks help to improve metadata completeness and quality, and open up the possibility for future enhancements such as detecting missing ORCID IDs, content quality checks such as consistent capitalization and punctuation, as well as extensions to support plugins, including DOAJ and Google Scholar.
In summary, thanks to this CRAFT-OA development initiative over the last three years, the 3.5 and 3.6 releases of OJS, OMP, and OPS include increased support and flexibility for less-resourced languages, improved metadata quality, integrity, and interoperability, platform usability, and data protection standards.
Furthermore, this initiative is a working example of how attending to the needs of one region or demographic has the potential to benefit the global community of users and developers. By continuing to maintain and build upon these features, the wider PKP community has the ability to extend the multilingual support and metadata interoperability to the wider ecosystem.
You can access more CRAFT-OA deliverables here.
Jump to other sections of the newsletter
📌 Sustaining open infrastructure together: A warm thanks to TIB
📌 Inside 3.5 with UX / UI Designer Devika Goel: Part 2
📌 PKP update on its open infrastructure accessibility work
📌 Inclusive global publishing: PKP Documentation and Multilingualism Specialist Emma Uhl
📌 Regional feature: Canada’s leadership in diamond open access
📌 Coalition Publica’s Tanja Niemann and Kevin Stranack on Canada’s diamond open access future
