Coalition Publica is pleased to announce that it is adopting the Long-term Support (LTS) version of Open Journal Systems (OJS) as the minimum required version for participating journals and their hosting providers.
In February 2022, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) announced that it would adopt an LTS policy for its open source software suite, in order to “help our community run and maintain our software. This decision will help our community of users schedule their upgrades by providing a fixed timeline for major software updates.” By aligning our approach and adopting the OJS LTS as the minimum required version, we can continue to provide sustainable technical support to journals using Coalition Publica’s digital publishing infrastructure and facilitate future developments of that infrastructure.
OJS 3.3 was named the first LTS version of that software, meaning that PKP will provide security patches and bug fixes until its planned End of Life (EOL), currently scheduled for January 1, 2025. A new LTS will be announced at least one year before the EOL date, which will provide time to schedule and complete an upgrade. All participating journals and their hosting providers will have until December 31, 2023 to upgrade to the current LTS (OJS 3.3) or a later version, and new journals and hosting providers will be required to be running at least the LTS version when they join. Coalition Publica will communicate with those directly affected by this change and provide them with support through the PKP Community Forum.
If a journal or hosting provider is unable to upgrade to the LTS version of OJS by December 31, 2023, Coalition Publica will continue to harvest content from the journal’s older version of OJS, but if the harvesting connection fails, Coalition Publica will not provide technical support, and the journal will need to make other arrangements to transfer its content to Érudit for dissemination on erudit.org.
In the future, participating journals and hosting providers will be required to upgrade to the next LTS version or later before the EOL of the current LTS, and Coalition Publica will communicate these as they become available. This new support policy is intended to facilitate a streamlined approach to our services and support, and maximize the value of Coalition Publica’s community-supported infrastructure. Please send any comments or questions to info@coalition-publi.ca.
