L’appel de propositions du Forum des revues étudiantes est ouvert ! Cet appel s’adresse aux étudiants canadiens qui participent à la publication de revues étudiantes ou qui s’y intéressent. The English version is available here.

Le Forum annuel des revues étudiantes (SJF) est un événement en ligne amusant, décontracté et engageant qui aura lieu la semaine du 17 au 20 février 2026 (dates exactes à déterminer).

Avez-vous hâte à 2026 ? Consultez les pages précédentes du SJF pour visionner une sélection d’enregistrements et de diapositives de sessions.

Appel à propositions

Le Student Journal Forum 2026 lance un appel de propositions pour des sessions virtuelles qui se tiendront pendant la semaine du 17 février 2026 (dates précises à déterminer). Cet événement accueille des participant·es de tous horizons, avec un accent particulier sur les étudiant·es postsecondaires au Canada qui sont impliqué·es dans ou qui envisagent la création d’une revue étudiante. Le Forum se destine également à celles et ceux qui cherchent à entrer en contact avec d’autres personnes impliquées dans la communauté de l’édition des revues étudiantes.

Nous invitons les personnes qui souhaitent partager des informations sur les revues étudiantes à soumettre des propositions de présentation de 10 minutes en anglais ou en français. Nous espérons ainsi faciliter la prise de parole aux étudiant·es qui souhaitent s’exprimer en français, mais la majorité de l’événement se déroulera en anglais. Nous encourageons particulièrement les étudiant·es à partager leurs expériences, leurs défis et leurs points de vue.

Voici quelques suggestions de sujets de présentation :

• Lancer une nouvelle revue
• Attirer les auteur·trices
• Recruter et former des pair·es évaluateur·trices
• Gérer les processus techniques (p. ex., produire des fichiers d’impression, assimiler les plateformes de publication, la correction d’épreuves)
• Promouvoir votre revue
• Favoriser l’équité et l’inclusion dans l’édition de revues
• Respecter les principes de publication éthiques
• Améliorer la découvrabilité de votre revue, notamment en demandant son inclusion dans le DOAJ et d’autres indexeurs/bases de données
• Modifier les pratiques de votre revue (p.ex., l’évaluation par les pair·es ou la rédaction) et évaluer les résultats
• Publier des contenus non traditionnels, multimédias ou multimodaux
• Établir des partenariats, tels que des collaborations avec des facultés, d’autres groupes universitaires ou des organisations communautaires
• Partager l’expérience d’un auteur·trice en matière de soumission et de publication dans une revue étudiante

Nous utilisons ces sujets pour nous aider à choisir les sessions afin d’équilibrer le programme. La procédure de soumission des propositions est simple et rapide.

Pour une liste des sessions des années précédentes, voir la page des événements passés du forum.

Veuillez noter que les événements précédents se sont déroulés en anglais, et par conséquent, les pages des événements ne sont que disponibles en anglais.

Soumissions

Veuillez remplir le formulaire de soumission en ligne.

Vous pouvez télécharger le modèle de formulaire pour vous préparer et travailler sur votre proposition hors ligne avant d’utiliser le formulaire de soumission. Le comité d’organisation du Forum examinera chaque proposition et vous fera part de ses observations.

• Appel à propositions: 16 octobre 2025
• Date limite pour les propositions : 18 novembre 2025
• Avis d’acceptation : décembre 2025
• Mise-en-ligne du programme : janvier 2025
• Student Journal Forum : 17-20 février 2026

Inscrivez-vous pour recevoir les mises à jour du forum (en anglais)

Rejoignez la liste de diffusion des rédacteurs de revues étudiantes au Canada pour recevoir des nouvelles et des mises à jour concernant le SJF 2026 et d’autres événements destinés aux rédacteurs. Vous pourrez également lancer des discussions et établir des contacts avec d’autres rédacteurs via cette liste.

S’abonner à la liste de diffusion

Contactez-nous

Des questions? Pour plus d’informations, contactez Gabby Crowley, coprésidente du SJF 2025, à l’adresse gabby.crowley@utoronto.ca. Des mise-à-jours sera également partagées sur Bluesky : @canadasjf.bsky.social

The post Forum du Journal étudiant du Canada : Appel de propositions maintenant ouvert appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

The Student Journal Forum Call for Proposals is open! The call is open to students in Canada who are involved with or interested in student journal publishing. Version française disponible ici.

The annual Student Journal Forum (SJF) is a fun, easy-going, engaging online event that will take place the week of February 17th – 20th, 2026 (exact dates TBD).

Now in its 11th year, this Canada-wide online event is open to everyone but is targeted at post-secondary students in Canada who are involved with or considering starting a student journal. PKP is proud to support this event once again this year.

Can’t wait until 2026? Browse through previous SJF pages for select session recordings and slides.

Call for Proposals

The Student Journal Forum 2026 invites proposals for virtual sessions to be held the week of February 17th – 20th, 2026 (exact dates TBD). This online event welcomes participants of all backgrounds, with a specific focus on post-secondary students in Canada who are involved with or contemplating the creation of a student journal, or those seeking to connect with others involved in the student journal publishing community.

We invite everyone interested in sharing information about student journals to submit proposals for 10 minute presentations in English or French. We particularly encourage students to share their experiences, challenges, and insights.

Some suggested presentation topics include:

• Starting a new journal
• Attracting author submissions
• Recruiting and training peer reviewers
• Managing technical processes (e.g., producing galley files, publishing platforms, copyediting)
• Promoting your journal
• Equity and inclusion in journal publishing
• Following ethical publishing practices
• Enhancing discoverability for your journal, including applying for inclusion in the DOAJ and other indexes
• Changing your journal’s practices (e.g., peer review or editing) and an assessment of the outcomes
• Publishing non-traditional, multimedia, or multi-modal content
• Partnerships, such as working with faculty, other campus groups, or community organisations
• The author experience of submitting to/publishing with a student journal

You are welcome to propose your own topic. The proposal submission process is light-weight and fast.

For inspiration, you can find a list of previous SJF presentations on the forum events page.

Submissions

Please submit using only the webform.

You may download a template of the submission form to review the proposal criteria and to work on your proposal offline, but must return to this form to submit. The Forum organising committee will review each proposal and will provide feedback.

• Call for Submissions opens: October 16, 2025
• Submission deadline: November 18, 2025
• Acceptance notifications: December 2025
• Program published: January 2026
• Student Journal Forum: Week of February 17 – 20, 2026 (exact dates TBD)

Sign Up for Forum Updates

Join the listserv for student journal editors in Canada to receive news and updates about SJF 2026 and other events for editors. You can also initiate a discussion and make connections with fellow editors via the listserv.

Subscribe to the listserv

Contact Us

Questions about the event? Please contact Gabby Crowley, Co-Chair of SJF 2026, by email at gabby.crowley@utoronto.ca. We’ll also be posting updates on Bluesky: @canadasjf.bsky.social

The post Canada Student Journal Forum Call for Proposals now Open appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

The Publication Facts Label Is Now Freely Available for the 34,000 Journals Using OJS (V. 3.3 – 3.5)

There’s no better way for journal publishers and editors to address today’s questions of research integrity than to implement PKP’s Publication Facts Label (PFL) in their instance of OJS (versions 3.3 – 3.5). The open source PFL Plugin automatically generates a label in the appropriate language for every research article, which will appear as a drop-down on the article’s landing page. 

The PFL has been developed in response to rising concerns over research integrity, given the threats posed by the growth of paper mills, reviewer cabals, data manipulation, or predatory publishers. This contributes to declining public confidence in research and scientists. 

At this point, the publishing industry is developing a variety of fraud-detection strategies, often involving AI, to deter and weed out fraudulent research before publication. The Public Knowledge Project believes that this behind-the-scenes work needs to be complemented by a clear public statement on research articles that provides the details on the care that has gone into ensuring research is a reliable information source. 

Employing decades of platform expertise, PKP has devised and tested a Publication Facts Label (PFL) for use with PKP’s Open Journal Systems. Clicking the Publication Facts dropdown on an article’s landing page reveals data on ten scholarly publishing standards drawn directly from the publishing platform. PKP is also exploring with other platform developers and publishers the potential for an industry-wide implementation of the PFL. 

The PFL builds on the Nutrition Facts Label’s success in presenting factual data that has been shown to influence consumer thinking. The PFL has been developed in consultation with editors, researchers, science journalists, high school students, and their families. In Nature’s Question of the Week, 73% of 3,785 readers thought it “would be useful” (Apr 19 2024, scroll down). At an OASPA publishers’ presentation, 72 out of 73 attendees thought it would be “a useful addition to journals” (Sep 24, 2024). In a 130-journal PFL trial, of the 201 readers who opened it, “public” readers (21%) ranked its usefulness highest at 4.4 / 5 (Jun 25, 2025). 

To implement the PFL in your journal, ask whomever is hosting your journals (the Systems Admin) to follow these directions, which include instructions for editors to set the start date, indexes, and make other modifications. 

John Willinsky willinsk@stanford.edu 
Public Knowledge Project Founder

More Information on the Publication Facts Label

1. YouTube Video (3 min)
2. PFL Slide Deck
3. PFL Information page

The post This label will put your journal’s research integrity in black and white appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

This October 20 – 26 is International Open Access Week 2025, organized by SPARC in partnership with the Open Access Week Advisory Committee. PKP takes the time to answer the theme question, “Who Owns Our Knowledge?” and invites communities to join in.

This year’s theme asks a pointed question about the present moment and how, in a time of disruption, communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce (OA Week homepage).

PKP Considers the Question of how Communities can Reassert Control over their Knowledge Production

In a time of growing concern about sovereignty and control of scholarly infrastructure — especially in politically unstable contexts — the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) offers a different path. We provide a distributed, quality open-source alternative that keeps ownership and control in the hands of the academic community.

We embrace the archipelago: a network of autonomous yet connected communities, united by shared values and a commitment to knowledge as a global public good.

At PKP, we believe scholars and communities should control how their knowledge is created, shared, and preserved. That’s why we develop free, open-source software — like Open Journal Systems (OJS)— that empowers thousands of journals worldwide to publish independently and openly.

This Open Access Week, we’re celebrating the people who make this possible: our global community of contributors. Together, we’re reclaiming scholarly publishing for the public good — through open tools, shared expertise, and collective action.

How Community Contributions Shape the Future of PKP

As a free and open-source (FOSS) initiative, PKP thrives through the collaboration and commitment of a diverse global community. Every contribution — whether technical, linguistic, educational, or financial — strengthens our shared infrastructure for open publishing.

This week, we’re highlighting a few of the ways our community sustains and expands this collective effort. From writing code and documentation to translating resources and funding development, your involvement helps ensure that open publishing remains open to all.

We invite you to join us in supporting community-led publishing for the public good.

Your participation — of any kind — helps keep knowledge creation and sharing in the hands of those who produce it.

Code Contributions: Expanding What’s Possible

Community developers around the world enhance our software — Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Monograph Press (OMP), and Open Preprint Systems (OPS) — by introducing new features, improving interoperability, and extending functionality through plugins.

This OA Week, we’re spotlighting recent work from the CRAFT-OA (Creating a Robust and Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access) project, whose OJS Diamond OA Plugins expand support for diamond open access workflows. These contributions demonstrate what’s possible when open infrastructure meets open collaboration.

…many high-quality Diamond journals remain underrecognised [sic] within the global research community… The objective of the OJS Diamond Plugins is twofold: to increase the visibility of Diamond OA journals and to simplify editorial workflows, enabling editors to focus on content curation rather than administrative burden. The five plugins developed under CRAFT-OA are designed to work together to address these goals in a modular and reusable way.

— Martina Dvořáková and Radek Gomola, Masaryk University Press, Czechia (from their Pubmet 2025 extended abstract for their presentation on “Plugging into quality: Boosting Diamond OA Journals with OJS Plugins“)

Check out the CRAFT-OA OJS Diamond Plugins

Documentation: Building Collective Knowledge

Not only is PKP software free and open source, underpinning open access, but we make our resources freely available so that PKP infrastructure users are empowered to use the software. One such example is PKP’s Documentation Hub, which offers user guides, developer documentation, and publishing resources for all our software. Thanks to countless community contributions, PKP Docs Hub remains current, practical, and comprehensive.

The systems that PKP produces and supports are essential for disintermediating scholarly publishing while still maintaining the high standards that accompany the ideal of peer review. Participating in the PKP Documentation Interest Group is my way of contributing to that important mission, and I’m happy to do what I can to support the global community.

— Amanda French, Research Organization Registry (ROR), Crossref

Recently, we launched the Learning Resources Interest Group to collaboratively develop the next generation of PKP learning materials — beyond written documentation. Together, we’re creating videos, quick guides, infographics, and slide decks that meet users where they are.

Stay tuned for opportunities to join a Working Group and help shape these new learning tools!

Translations: Supporting a Truly Global Community

As a global open-source project, PKP is committed to making our software and learning materials accessible in multiple languages. Our multilingual community plays a vital role — translating new software releases, documentation, and training materials so that open publishing is truly global.

In just one example, thanks in large apart to translation contributors, OJS is currently used by over 55,000 journals in over 150 countries, with journals publishing almost 9 million articles in more than 60 languages (based on 2024 stats).

Every translation is a seed of knowledge autonomy. When communities adapt our software into their own languages, they take ownership of a piece of the project. Under the stewardship of motivated scholars, a software translation can grow into new networks of open publishing that is owned, sustained, and defined by contributors and their collaborators in the regions they serve.

— Emma Uhl, PKP Documentation and Multilingualism Specialist

Learn more and get involved in PKP translations

Financial contributions sustain and grow essential work towards equitable future for scholarly publishing

Open infrastructure depends on open participation — and that includes financial and in-kind support from our communities.

PKP’s sustainability model combines Simon Fraser University’s administrative support, PKP Publishing Services revenue, and distributed contributions from global partners and financial contributors who share our mission. These include:

• Development Partners: Institutions that provide significant financial contributions and in-kind support that help set priorities for new features in PKP software through direct involvement in our governance structure.
• Financial Contributors: Libraries and organizations that fund open access initiatives and open infrastructure.
• Research Funders: Agencies and partners supporting PKP’s research and educational projects to advance equitable scholarly communication.

To learn more about PKP’s finances and partnerships, visit our Annual Reports.

Learn how your organization can support PKP

Join us to give back, care for the community, and stay engaged

Open infrastructure isn’t something we own — it’s something we care for together. As the landscape of scholarly communication continues to evolve, PKP remains committed to a future where knowledge creation and sharing are governed by the academic community itself.

At PKP, we believe that knowledge can only be a public good if everyone can participate. We extend scholarly publishing by creating spaces that are welcoming for all and that honour people’s right to know through diverse forms of research and scholarship.

This Open Access Week, we invite you to join us in that work.

Contribute your skills, your knowledge, or your support — and help build a publishing ecosystem where open truly means open for everyone.

Multiple ways to get involved

Please consider sharing these messages with your networks, tell your stories, and support the OA Week theme “Who owns our knowledge”. Use the hashtag #OAWeek and tag PKP!

PKP on social media

Don’t forget to sign up to PKP’s Community Newsletter, Archipelago, to get the latest news!

Sign up for Archipelago

The post Who Owns Our Knowledge? How Communities Power the Future of Open Publishing with PKP appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

Is it time for you to update your Open Journal Systems (OJS) installation? What else can you do to keep your installation secure and take part in the shared responsibility? What resources are available to you? Continue on to get answers to these questions.

Is it time to upgrade?

No matter what version of OJS you are using, updates may be available for you. It’s important to keep up with updates — they aren’t difficult to implement, and they fix bugs as well as keep everything running smoothly and securely.

• If you’re on OJS 3.3 LTS, you should update to the latest release (currently 3.3.0-21 as of October 2025; stay tuned for 3.5 LTS announcement)
• If you’re on OJS 3.4, you should update to the latest release (currently 3.4.0-9 as of October 2025)
• If you’re on 3.5, you should update to the latest release (currently 3.5.0-1 as of October 2025)

Check out what’s new in each version, access the release notebooks, and download updates on PKP’s OJS Download page.

What else can you do to stay secure?

• Use a strong password: it’s a simple habit that makes a big difference for your security.
• Stick with a unique username: make sure your account details are distinct. Avoid generic usernames like “admin”.

Additional Resources

• Admin guide for installing OJS
• PKP Docs upgrading guide
• How to upgrade from 3.3.0 to 3.5.0 video (stay tuned for branch-specific upgrading videos)
• PKP Community Forum Software Support category
• Subscribe to PKP Security Announcements

Share the responsibility

Maintaining decentralized, free and open source software is a community responsibility and we must all pitch in. Free and open source software thrives on shared responsibility.

We’re doing our part by monitoring and releasing new point updates and you can do yours by implementing those updates when they’re available. Help keep PKP FOSS safe and secure!

The post Memo: Keeping your OJS Installation Secure appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

Join us October 28, 2025, 8 AM PDT, to learn about new features and enhancements coming with the OJS 3.6 release in 2026.

Launching in 2026, OJS / OMP / OPS version 3.6 introduces several long-anticipated improvements to support more flexible and efficient publishing practices. This webinar is the first in a series highlighting the new features and enhancements coming with this release.

Topics

In this session, we’ll focus on two key developments: continuous publication and article versioning.

• Continuous publication enables editors to publish articles as soon as they are ready, without waiting for an entire issue to be complete.
• Enhanced article versioning allows journals to make preprints or “author originals” available ahead of peer review, while providing a clear distinction between early versions and the final version of record.

Participants will see how these features work in 3.6, learn how to configure them for their journals, and have the opportunity to engage directly with PKP developers to ask questions and discuss future directions.

Whether you’re an editor, journal manager, or part of a publishing team, this session will provide practical insight into how OJS 3.6 can help streamline workflows and expand publishing options.

Webinar details

Tuesday, October 28, 2025, 8 – 9 AM PDT (convert the time zone). Online, free.

This webinar will be recorded and shared with the public. If you can’t make it, register anyway and get the recording!

The hosts will disable microphones and video screens, and there will be opportunities for questions and comments. AI bots are not permitted and will be removed from the meeting.

Use of Eventbrite to register is voluntary. Eventbrite data is stored on U.S. servers. If you prefer not to use Eventbrite to register for this event, please register by emailing commpkp[at]sfu.ca – subject line: 3.6 webinar registration.

Zoom’s privacy statement

Thank you for considering joining the webinar. If you prefer to send questions or comments to PKP after the event in an alternative format, please contact PKP.

The post Coming in OJS 3.6: Continuous publication and journal article versions appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

Registration is now open for the Open Publishing Series — three online courses from SFU’s MPub program, with start dates in January and May, 2026. Check out the October 30 webinar recording to meet the instructors and learn more.

In an era of disinformation, polarization, and growing mistrust of academic institutions, scholarly publishing is more important now than ever. Last month we shared a Sneak Peek at the Open Publishing Series, a collection of three online courses developed in collaboration with the Master of Publishing (MPub) program at Simon Fraser University (SFU) as part of SFU’s new scholarly communications stream  – designed to help students and practitioners navigate this rapidly changing landscape with confidence.

We’re excited to announce that registration is now open to learners from around the world through SFU LifeLong Learning! Keep reading for information about what you’ll learn and how to register.

Open Publishing Courses: Register Now

Whether you’re interested in enhancing your skills and knowledge in journal management and editing, exploring technologies and infrastructures for scholarly publishing, or investigating the principles of knowledge as a global public good, the Open Publishing series has you covered.

Taught by expert instructors from SFU, these courses will be of particular interest to scholarly publishing professionals, including current and aspiring librarians, journal managers, and journal editors.

Register for courses

Registration is open for continuing education (non-credit) students through SFU LifeLong Learning. 

• PUB 604: Technologies and Infrastructure for Academic Publishing (starts January 2026): Register here (course details).
• PUB 611: Making Knowledge Public (starts January 2026): Register here (course details).
• PUB 603: Journal Management and Editing (starts May 2026): Register here (course details).

Apply for a course discount

We are committed to keeping these courses accessible. Discounts and fee waivers are available for a limited number of participants with financial constraints, especially those without institutional support or from underrepresented regions. 

Please contact commpkp@sfu.ca with the nature of your need, including your role, institutional affiliation, and country of residence. Requests will be reviewed confidentially and fairly, with priority given to those who would otherwise be unable to participate.

Meet the instructors and discover what you’ll learn

Technologies and Infrastructure for Academic Publishing (PUB 604)

Course dates: January – April, 2026 | Course details | Register here | Cost approx. $670 USD ($930 CAD)

What technologies and infrastructures support the publishing, discovery, preservation, and linking of scholarship? What tools and services create the “scholarly record”?

This course equips students with the expertise to navigate the growing landscape of academic publishing technologies — covering systems, standards, techniques, and platforms for sustainable academic publishing.

Alison Moore is a Digital Scholarship Librarian at Simon Fraser University Library. Since joining SFU Library in 2015, Ali has focused on supporting student and faculty researchers with scholarly communications, research impact, and online presence.

Ali has held a number of roles at SFU Library, most recently as the Acting Head, Learning & Engagement, the Digital Scholarship Librarian in the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab, and Manager, Knowledge Mobilization. Ali has an MLIS from McGill University and a BA from UBC in Political Science and English Literature. Prior to joining SFU Library, Ali worked at the Vancouver Public Library, Concordia Libraries, and the Vancouver Pacific Swim Club.

Making Knowledge Public (PUB 611)

Course dates: January – April, 2026 | Course details | Register here | Cost approx. $670 USD ($930 CAD)

How does research shape public policy? How is the public involved in science? And how is knowledge that is produced at universities taken up by society?

This course examines the changing role of research, knowledge-making, and truth in the public sphere — exploring the public value of scholarship, the pressures that diminish this mission, and the need for universities and researchers to engage more purposefully with society.

Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin is an Associate Professor in Publishing, Co-Director of the ScholCommLab, and Scientific Director of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) at Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Dr. Alperin is an established researcher of scholarly communications, known for bringing evidence-based perspectives to pragmatic solutions in support of open access and open science. He has published dozens of peer-reviewed publications and delivered countless presentations on related topics and serves on the boards and steering committees of various organizations, including the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) and OpenAlex. His work focuses on making scholarly communication more equitable, inclusive, and publicly engaged, particularly across Latin America and the Global South.

Journal Management and Editing (PUB 603)

Course dates: May – August, 2026 | Course details | Register here | Cost approx. $670 USD ($930 CAD)

This course equips students with the knowledge and skills to navigate the growing landscape of academic journal publishing — covering content curation, peer review, editorial strategies, copyright, publication ethics, and the practical workflows needed to operate a journal, with an emphasis on open access.

Jennifer Zerkee is a Copyright Specialist in the Simon Fraser University Copyright Office, based in the SFU Library. She joined SFU Library in 2011 and has been the Copyright Specialist since 2013. 

Jennifer develops and delivers copyright education and information to instructors, researchers, students, and staff. She helps academic authors understand their rights when publishing, and provides assistance with understanding and applying Creative Commons licences to open access publications and open educational materials. Her areas of research include copyright advocacy, legislation reform, and copyright administration in post-secondary institutions. Jennifer holds a Certificate in Law from Queen’s University and a Creative Commons Certificate for Librarians, in addition to an MAS from the University of British Columbia and a BA from SFU.

Want to learn more? Check out the webinar recording

On October 30th, PKP and SFU held a 90-minute webinar with all three course instructors for a behind-the-scenes look at what you’ll learn in each course. Get an introduction to the instructors, overview of key concepts and course highlights. 

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 01:01 Course introductions
• 04:32 To bring you these courses – SFU Partner collaborations
• 09:30 How to register
• 10:35 Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin (PUB611 Making Knowledge Public)
• 23:37 Ali Moore (PUB604 Tech & Infrastructure for Academic Publishing)
• 34:25 Jennifer Zerkee (PUB603 Journal Management & Editor)

Access the YouTube description to get additional links that were shared in the webinar and transcripts. Dubbing in multiple languages and auto-translated caption options are also available in the video settings.

Stay informed!

Sign up to stay informed about program updates and be notified about future course offerings in the Open Publishing Series.

The post Register Now for PKP + SFU Open Publishing Courses! appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

After months of community consultations, analysis of input from the Community Forum and Beacon data, collaboration across every PKP team, and drawing on deep expertise in book publishing, PKP’s OMP Coordinator, Zoe Wake Hyde, has released her Final Report.

In OMP Under the Spotlight, Zoe explores the central question:

“How does, can, and should PKP contribute to a thriving open book publishing ecosystem?”

The report lays out a clear vision for OMP’s future. One that responds to the diverse needs of our growing user community, whether they are publishing scholarly books, theses, dissertations, reports, creative works, or running institutional publishing programs, library presses, open educational resources, or independent projects.

Zoe’s vision highlights:

• Integration with scholarly publishing infrastructures to ensure alignment with good practices and broad discoverability
• Leverage of PKP’s position and reputation in the open community
• Leadership as stewards of critical open infrastructure
• Experience working closely with open source contributors
• Revenue generation through hosted clients, sponsored development funding, and grants
• Position as a site for research into & education around open scholarly publishing

From this foundation, Zoe develops a roadmap to bring OMP to closer parity with OJS, addressing user needs through innovations in chapter handling, publication types, accessibility, theming, press settings, and terminology.

For full details, we encourage you to read the complete report.

The post OMP Under the Spotlight: Final report appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

In this segment of Archipelago, explore the recap of events since August 2025. From the IFLA Congress in Kazakhstan to the latest OASPA conference and more, there is a lot to be excited about.

IFLA World Library and Information Congress

August 18-22, Astana, Kazakhstan

PKP’s Scholarly Publishing Advisor, Mariya Maistrovskaya, joined the 89th IFLA Congress with her presentation “It Takes a Village: How Library Contributions to Open Infrastructure Shape Global Open Science” highlighting how library-led contributions to open platforms and collaborative support structures are helping grow a sustainable, scalable, and interoperative scholarly landscape. 

“This was my first time at IFLA WLIC and I was blown away by the diversity of countries, libraries, and perspectives that the conference brought together. I have had so many conversations with folks I would have never met otherwise. And despite this not being a publishing-specific conference, I was amazed to discover that PKP was well known and recognized among the attendees I spoke with. I was happy to have been a part of the discussions about open infrastructure, open science, scholarly communications, and publishing.” Mariya Maistrovskaya, PKP, Scholarly Publishing Advisor

Keep an eye on their repository, full slides and write-up coming up soon.

PKP Development News Webinar

Monday, September 15

Hosted quarterly throughout the year, these events feature experts from the PKP Development Team and offer insights into features and enhancements that are currently in development for OJS, OMP, and OPS. These events are of interest to Strategic Partners, Development Partners, Financial Contributors, and Community Contributors, as well as the wider community.

Watch the recording

CERN Open Science Fair

September 15-17,  CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

Scientific Director, Juan Pablo Alperin participated in the panel “Open Research Europe: A Catalyst towards Equitable Publishing”, where the panelists dialogued about the po tengial of the ORE platform along with the roles, motivations, perspectives and expectations of organisations that participate in this initiative, and explored the advancement of equitable publishing in Europe by focusing on the example of Open Research Europe (ORE).

Watch the recording here.

NISO Plus 2025

September 16-17

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) held its annual conference, which welcomed the presentation “Developing a New Community Standard: PKP’s Publication Facts Label” by PKP founder John Willinsky, Jane Taylor, Hannah Hechner Swain, and Alice Meadows. The presentation examined the challenges and opportunities for the Publishing Facts Label (PFL), which aims to provide standardized information on key elements of journal articles within the context of the journal in which they’re published and the broader group of journals utilizing the label, to become accepted as an industry standard.

 OASPA Annual Conference

September 22-24, Belgium

The panel “Scaling inclusive open access Models”  at the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association’s 2025 conference included Juan Pablo Alperin, PKP’s Scientific Director, in a thought-provoking dialogue about models, partnership opportunities, and different ways to sustain more inclusive models for open access

The post Featured Events Recap appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

PKP’s Community Engagement and Outreach Associate Director, Urooj Nizami, interviews OBC’s Managing Director, Joe Deville, to explore OBC’s origins, purpose, and relationships, as well as OMP and the open book publishing landscape, among other fascinating stories. 

Over the past year, Open Monograph Press (OMP), PKP’s book publishing software, has found itself riding a fresh wave of momentum. A big part of that energy comes from the Open Book Collective (OBC), whose support has helped spark new possibilities for the platform.

With OBC’s support, our OMP Coordinator, Zoe Wake Hyde, and the team have been able to think bigger and bolder about the future of OMP. On the horizon are improvements that get right to the heart of what makes a book a book: smarter chapter handling for richer metadata, smoother submission processes, and more intuitive workflows.

This collaboration offers more than just technical advancement, it’s about reshaping the open access book publishing landscape. Together with our communities, PKP and OBC are building the infrastructure, tools, and shared vision needed to reimagine what scholarly publishing can be when it’s open and built by the communities it serves.

Interview with Joe Deville, Managing Director of the Open Book Collective

1. Could you share the origin story of the Open Book Collective? What inspired its creation?

Very happy to. Of course, with something like the Open Book Collective, there isn’t just one origin story, but many. However, my personal involvement in what became the Open Book Collective can be traced back to a series of conversations that were happening in the 2010s between some independent open access academic-led book publishers, which included my own publisher – Mattering Press – as well as publishers such as Open Book Publishers, punctum books, Meson Press and others. What we were engaged with was trying to think how we could collaborate together and to scope out what the major challenges were that we were collectively facing as small, or at least smaller, open access book publishers. 

These conversations in due course led to an ultimately successful funding application to an organisation called OpenAIRE, to fund a project titled New Platforms for open access Book Distribution. We were extremely surprised that we were successful and very grateful of course. Over and above the specific project outputs, out of that project, came at least a key principle: that it was really vital for the future of open access book publishing that we invested deeply in collaboration over competition. We saw our competition as not each other, but the far larger range of commercial publishers in the ecosystem that were, in many ways, gobbling up many of the infrastructures and spaces for scholarly communication, including those for open access. We also started to think through what concrete solutions needed to be in place to address some of the challenges we identified. One of those was an idea for some kind of intermediary or platform that could scale the kind of diamond open access funding models that other publishers – Open Book Publishers and punctum books for example – had successfully developed. 

These conversations, alongside others happening elsewhere – and here I have to credit colleagues like Janneke Adema who really drove this forward, building party on her work in establishing the Radical open access Collective, led in due course to an application, to the Research England Development Fund and Arcadia for the project that would become in due course COPIM, standing for Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs. This project included a specific area of work focused on developing the aforementioned intermediary. 

Now we didn’t know what that intermediary would be and it took a long time to really work out how it’d work and how it would be governed, amongst other things. But fundamentally, it was rooted in the principle that it was vitally important to develop approaches that were collaborative rather than competitive. And I like to think that in many ways the Open Book Collective is a manifestation of that principle.

2. How did your background in sociology and science and technology studies influence your engagement with open access publishing? 

So partly the answer to that question lies in the origins of my own press, Mattering Press, that I was involved in co-founding. Mattering Press is a small scholar-led, open access book publisher, producing works in and around the field of science and technology studies. My colleagues and I set up that press because at that particular time, we noted that, while there existed a number of interesting open access journals, there was nothing really in our field for the publication of longform science and technology studies works. Based on little more than this insight, we set about – with little knowledge or understanding of publishing, let alone open access publishing – in establishing the press. 

In retrospect, this seems hopelessly naive. But there are broader reasons why an engagement between sociology and science and technology studies and open access is important, some of which have only become clearer to me as I’ve worked in the field. And here it’s worth noting that, for me, the promise of open access is not an entirely straightforward one. In actual fact, my Mattering Press colleague Endre Danyi and I, in the very early days of the press, wrote about this in calling for a focus on ‘openings’ rather than openness as an unqualified ‘good’. We can see, for example, how the ways open access is sometimes talked about has overlaps with certain facets of libertarian politics. 

For me, this is where both insights from both sociology and science and technology studies are important. From sociology, I have drawn an interest in the very real inequalities of scholarly publishing. From science and technology studies, I have become interested in thinking about the infrastructures of open access publishing. This field has looked at the specific role of infrastructures in a variety of contexts, including digital infrastructures, and the often underappreciated politics of those infrastructures. 

During the COPIM project, I, in close collaboration with my colleague Eileen Joy from punctum books, sought to put some of these principles to work, recognising that whatever we produced – what would become the Open Book Collective – would inevitably be a political intervention. So, for example, we ensured that we really prioritised the support of groups of initiatives via the Open Book Collective rather than encouraging potentially supporting universities to pick and choose between different entities – the latter would be to create something more akin to a conventional marketplace, which we were keen to avoid. And we also saw that this is also reflected, I think, in the way the Open Book Collective is governed – but I will come back to this later. 

3. What do you see as the relationship between critical technology studies and the engaged practice of open publishing and what is the imperative to support open infrastructures in building the open access future so many of us envision?

So the answer to this question very much carries on from what I was just talking about, as another part of the context that was informing much of our thinking in the early days of what would become the COPIM project was the fact that so many of the infrastructures of scholarly communication were ending up in the hands of large, highly commercial organisations (I increasingly hesitate to call them ‘publishers’). For me, the kinds of open access I am keen to support focus not just on making scholarly communication open, but also on making the infrastructures of scholarly communication open – and partly this is to do with ensuring that they are open source, but there is more to it than simply that – and they are community-led and community governed. Too often, we’ve seen promising open access infrastructure initiatives emerge and then being bought up by large commercial organisations. I’ve talked about this in some of the talks that I’ve given recently, but obvious examples include the purchase of Knowledge Unlatched by Wiley and Ubiquity Press by DeGruyter Brill.

For us it’s really important to support open infrastructures that provide an alternative to these kinds of commercial infrastructures. And this includes infrastructures with protections in place to prevent these kinds of acquisitions from happening. That’s something that we’ve sought to do with the Open Book Collective’s detailed and robust governance structure and in our registration as a charity in the UK. And it’s something that we continually advocate for other open infrastructure providers to be doing.

4. What is so distinctive about the book or monograph as a medium that drew OBC’s focus?

I’m a social scientist, working across the disciplines of sociology, science and technology studies and organisation studies. And within these disciplines, as in many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, the monograph or the book remains perhaps the most centrally important format. However, at the start of the work that I and my colleagues were involved with as part of the COPIM and its successor, Copim’s Open Book Futures project, it remains the case that there are far fewer options for publishing longform works open access, as there are for publishing shorter form, particularly journal articles, open access. 

For me and other project colleagues, it is a format that needs to be protected. It’s a format that requires specific infrastructures. These include funding infrastructures, of course – and the Open Book Collective is only one such infrastructure – but also infrastructures that help with the production of books – OMP is of course a vital tool in this respect – and with management of metadata and book dissemination – Thoth Open Metadata and DOAB / OAPEN are excellent examples. And it’s a format that has a quite different temporality to the journal article, which makes the author / institution pays model – the Book Processing Charge, the longform version of the Article Processing Charge – arguably even more unsuited. We have argued that the book processing charge is fundamentally not fit for purpose when it comes to being a model for supporting open access book publishing.

5. What core values and frameworks underpin OBC’s mission and vision?

I’ve already talked about how important supporting the longform texts is. So here I’ll just highlight a few other core values. One is a real commitment to bibliodiversity. We think it’s really important that the scholarly system as a whole has in place mechanisms to support different kinds of publishers, producing different kinds of texts, working in different kinds of languages, using different formats, amongst many other possible points of variation. Practically, we look to support this value through the kinds of publishers and infrastructure providers that we have as members, but also in other ways. For example, we will soon be launching our website as multilingual and are really focusing on bringing on board more non-English language presses, to join our first predominantly non-Anglo press, Verlag Barbara Budrich. 

Another really important principle is what we call ‘scaling small’, which we counterpose to approaches that look to scale up. One of the achievements of the Open Book Collective, I think, is to begin to democratise the diamond open access funding model. Up until the existence of the Open Book Collective it simply wasn’t feasible or practicable for smaller initiatives – such as my own, Mattering Press, but also a number of other open access presses – to run their own, independent diamond open access programmes. What we do at the Open Book Collective is take on the work of hosting this kind of programme. This includes both administering them, including dealing with the resulting financial flows, and doing the outreach necessary to generate support for those programmes. This is no small task and to my mind embodies this principle of scaling small, in that it brings together members from a variety of different contexts into one space and provides a single offer to supporting universities, while sustaining each initiative individually. 

6. How does OBC see the future of open publishing, and what role does it hope to play in that landscape?

Here it’s worth highlighting that the Open Book Collective is a key partner on Copim’s second project, the Open Book Futures project, which I already mentioned. The project has this question – of the future of scholarly communication – very much at its heart. 

I would very much agree with my other project colleagues that we see this future as one where we are having an increasingly resilient network of community-led open infrastructure providers, collaborating together with open access publishers to deliver a bibliodiverse and financially sustainable way of doing open access publishing, producing texts of the highest quality with field leading standards of metadata quality, with rigorous peer review (and that, to me, does not necessarily mean conventional, double blind peer review), which then flow freely and easily to a wide variety of different spaces (one of the huge advantages of open access texts of course, is their ability to move freely in scholarly space because of their open licence. And we know that open access texts, for example, are cited far more than their closed access equivalents). What is striking to me is how close we already are to seeing at least the key building blocks for delivering this future in place – I like to think the Open Book Collective is one such building block, but there are certainly others: PKP, obviously, and our project colleagues OAPEN / DOAB and Thoth Open Metadata, but also emerging initiatives like the Open Journals Collective. 

7. In your view, how does OMP address a gap or meet a need in the open book publishing landscape?

I’ve really witnessed first hand the potential that OMP has, particularly in my recent engagements with colleagues in Africa. I’ve worked particularly closely with colleagues at the University of Cape Town and the African Platform for Open Scholarship, and I’ve seen that amongst its members, OMP is offering them an absolutely vital route for sustaining themselves, in many cases, as a librarian-led open access book publisher. I have seen the ways that OMP makes it far, far easier for them to manage their workflows and then potentially also to get the books into those dissemination channels. This, for me, really demonstrates the potential of open, freely available, robust open infrastructures for scholarly communication. 

8. Which communities and networks does OBC most actively engage with?

I suppose that one of the features of our work is that we are routinely engaging with different sides of the publishing ecosystem. So obviously we are engaging with publishers and infrastructure providers – talking to them about how we work, what our membership criteria are, exploring whether they could benefit from collaborating with the Open Book Collective, and so on. And then of course we are engaging with libraries and sometimes their representatives, particularly library consortia – similarly, exploring opportunities for collaboration and explaining our model and our values. 

Much of this work happens in a broadly Global North context. But as I’ve alluded to already, we also engage much more broadly. One of the particular features of the Open Book Collective is our annual small grants programme – the Collective Development Fund – that publishers and networks interested in expanding their open access book publishing work can apply to. We have a requirement that at least 30% of funds awarded should go to projects that benefit lower and middle income networks or initiatives. In our first round of funding in 2024, we comfortably exceeded that threshold and we expect to do so again in our current second round, the recipients of which will be announced later this year. 

So in this respect, our terrain is, I suppose, global. And it is also multilingual. We released our recent Collective Development Fund calls in not just English but also French, Portuguese and Spanish. And we also have recently increased the multilingualism of our team. We were really pleased to take on board a new colleague recently: Arturo Garduño-Magaña, who has joined as our Metadata Management Associate. As part of this work, he is really spearheading our engagement in Latin American and Spanish language contexts, which is something I am really excited to follow in the coming months. 

Of course, there is still a lot more work to do. The Open Book Collective remains relatively new and is still unknown in many quarters of the scholarly landscape. This is why I’m very grateful for these kinds of opportunities to talk about our work. 

9. In your time with OBC, what has most surprised you?

I’ll be quite honest here, I think what surprised me the most is that the model works. Of course, I hoped and believed that it could. But at the start of our work, I genuinely did not know whether any universities would take what we are trying to do seriously. Our first subscription was from the University of Manchester and they decided to support what was then our entire package. I can’t express how happy we were to receive that first subscription – and from what is a highly respected university in a UK context. It was a real moment of validation of some of the arguments that we have been putting forward for some time. 

Now we are in a position where we have raised over £1million [circa $1.35million / CAD$ 1.85million / €1.15million] in commitments for our publisher and infrastructure provider members, which continues to astonish me when I see it written down. However, it is a little bit misleading: there is still a huge amount of work still to be done, both to fully secure our own future, without recourse to external grant funding, and to further support our members. But I think what we have shown is more than just a proof of concept: models like the Open Book Collective really can succeed in being transformative of the conditions of scholarly communication.

10. How can institutions best support OBC and, in turn, the publishers and infrastructure it so effectively helps sustain?

As I’ve mentioned, a key part of our advocacy is directly to academic libraries and we hugely welcome the support that libraries and consortia are able to provide to us. This in many ways, of course, is the bottom line. But there are a far wider range of ways that library colleagues can support us if their university or their colleagues are not yet in a position to be able to sign off on this support. This can include simply inviting us to engage with your colleagues, to allow us to answer their questions and to enable us to present the work we are doing and the rationale behind it. It could also include engaging with the various calls that we make for collaboration – for example, to support the reviewing of Collective Development Fund applications – or our webinars and workshops.

But even more broadly than that, colleagues in various parts of the scholarly ecosystem can support us just by being open to thinking about what scholarly publishing is and how it should be funded. In the pitches we make to universities we of course do make clear how we are directly relevant to them, to their staff, and to their library strategies. But we also make clear that supporting the Open Book Collective and our publisher and service provider members is about more than just that: it is also about the urgent need to support the wider global open access ecosystem. So I think having and helping foster an openness to those kinds of arguments and to thinking of scholarly publishing not in terms of a service relationship but a space for genuine, mutual collaboration. So yes, please do come to us with an open mind. This is perhaps most important of all, in the final analysis.

Thank you, Joe, for this very insightful and thought provoking interview. You’ve really painted a picture of OBC, the collaborative nature, the impacts of infrastructure on knowledge sharing, and the importance of supporting that infrastructure, as well as some fascinating stories.

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Our relationship with OBC has given us the chance to take a fresh, thoughtful look at OMP. It’s encouraged us to think more deeply about accessibility and usability, and has opened up a more direct, meaningful connection with the community we serve. We’re truly grateful to OBC for the insight, collaboration, and care you’ve brought to this work. Looking ahead, we’re excited to continue building on this momentum, together, toward more inclusive, distributed, responsive, and community driven publishing tools.

Open Book Collective releases testimonial video

Watch “Open Book Collective in action: Hear from our community: “We are excited to share a new testimonial video about building a fairer and more sustainable future for scholarly books featuring Joe Deville (Mattering Press Trustee & OBC Managing Director), Janneke Adema (Associate Professor in Digital Media, Coventry University), Juan Pablo Alperin (Scientific Director, Public Knowledge Project), Kaitlin Thaney (Executive Director, Invest in Open Infrastructure), Josiline Phiri Chigwada (University Librarian, Chinhoyi University of Technology), and Francois van Schalkwyk (Managing Trustee, African Minds). Filmed at the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access at the University of Cape Town, December 2024.”

This news came from OBC’s newsletter. Sign up to OBC’s newsletter for more updates like this! 

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