The option to publish multiple versions of one research paper, while maintaining the original version and allowing for a version history, is a much seeked-after feature for open access publishing. OJS did not support this kind of agile publishing - until now. The German OJS network project OJS-de.net has created a solution to add versioning of published articles in OJS 3. In this lightning talk, I will briefly outline the main functions of the new versioning feature, while also mentioning some of the complex workflow decision that had to be made while designing and developing it.

We decided to implement an option to centrally enable or disable versioning for the entire journal. Once activated, the editors can outline their versioning policy in the "About" section of the journal. The design of the versioning workflow is similar to the concept of review rounds and new article versions can be created by the push of a button. Once a new version is created, older versions cannot be edited anymore, in order to encourage editors to transparently label all changes in an article - rather than just changing an existing article, like before. Versions are linked at the article page under the heading “version history” and the corresponding metadata and files are displayed at its own page, while old versions have a notice and a link to the recent version.