Hi all, there has been a lot of excitement around CRAFT-OA (Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access) developments for OJS 3.5 and 3.6.
3.5
PKP’s Magnus Lu, with assistance from @bozana Bokan, provide a summary of highlights over 3 years of work together around 3.5.
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.
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:
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Allowing editors to work with user and reviewer data in a GDPR-compliant manner
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Improving access to multilingual content and metadata
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Increasing metadata quality and availability
Check out GDPR-compliant invitations for users and reviewers, multilingualism enhancements, decoupling the metadata language from the journal interface, viewing and editing the submission language, improving metadata quality and availability, contributor recognition via CRediT, data citations, and automatic metadata validation via Crossref:
https://pkp.sfu.ca/2025/11/27/craft-oa-3-years/
3.6
Antti-Jussi Nygård @ajnyga highlights work being done for 3.6 for building better metadata.
OJS 3.6 will include two significant developments produced within the project: new metadata features led by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) and GDPR-compliant reviewer invitation workflows implemented by the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library. In addition to these core contributions to OJS itself, TIB has also developed an enhanced metadata validation mechanism, the Publication Validator plugin, which improves metadata completeness.
Learn more about strengthened foundation for structured metadata, structured and machine-readable contributor role taxonomy, recognizing organizations and collective authorship, integrating CRediT attribution into the core workflow, making research data visible with structured citations, controlled vocabularies for higher quality metadata, and contributing to a sustainable OJS ecosystem:
https://www.craft-oa.eu/building-better-metadata-craft-oa-contributions-arriving-in-ojs-3-6/
Although the CRAFT-OA project concludes at the end of 2025, the features it delivers will continue to evolve within the PKP community. Their integration across OJS, OMP, and OPS ensures that the project’s impact extends beyond its duration, supporting multilingual Diamond Open Access publishing for years to come.