The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

policies, and on developing strategies for making this possible including software solutions. It is a partnership between the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, the University of Pittsburgh, Ontario Council of University Libraries, the California Digital Library and the School of Education at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments.

History

The PKP was founded in 1998 by

John Willinsky John Willinsky (born 1950) is a Canadian educator, activist, and author. Willinsky is currently on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Education where he is the Khosla Family Professor. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada a ...

in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, based on his research in education and publishing. Willinsky is a leading advocate of

publishing, and has written extensively on the value of public research. The PKP's initial focus was on increasing access to scholarly research and output beyond the traditional academic environments. This soon led to a related interest in scholarly communication and publishing, and especially on ways to make it more cost effective and less reliant on commercial enterprises and their generally restricted access models. PKP has developed free, open source software for the management, publishing, and indexing of journals, conferences, and monographs. The PKP has collaborated with a wide range of partners interested in making research publicly available, including the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Brazilian Institute for Information Science and Technology (IBICT), and the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP). Together with INASP, the PKP is working with publishers, librarians, and academics in the development of scholarly research portals in the developing world, including African Journals OnLine (AJOL) and Asia Journals Online. As of 2008, the PKP has joined the Synergies Canada initiative, contributing their technical expertise to integrating work being done within a five-party consortium to create a decentralized national platform for social sciences and humanities research communication in Canada.

Growth 2005 to 2009

The Public Knowledge Project grew between 2005 and 2009. In 2006, there were approximately 400 journals using Open Journal Systems (OJS), 50 conferences using

Open Conference Systems The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making th ...

(OCS), 4 organizations using the Harvester, and 350 members registered on the online support forum. In 2009, over 5000 journals were using OJS, more than 500 conferences were using OCS, at least 10 organizations are using the Harvester, and there were over 2400 members on the support forum. Since 2005, there were major releases (version 2) of three software modules (OJS, OCS, Harvester), as well as the addition of Lemon8-XML, with a growing number of downloads being recorded every month for all of the software. From June 12, 2009 to December 21, 2009, there were 28451 downloads of OJS, 6329 of OCS, 1255 of the Harvester, and 1096 of Lemon8-XML. A new module,

Open Monograph Press The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making thi ...

(a publication management system for monographs) has also been released. The PKP also witnessed increased community programming contributions, including new plugins and features, such as the subscription module, allowing OJS to support full open access, delayed open access, or full subscription-only access. A growing number of translations have been contributed by community members, with Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese versions of OJS completed, and several others in production.

Growth from 2010

A German platform, based on OJS, is being developed by the Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS), Free University of Berlin and two other institutions. Funding by the

German Research Foundation The German Research Foundation (german: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ; DFG ) is a German research funding organization, which functions as a self-governing institution for the promotion of science and research in the Federal Republic of Germ ...

(DFG) initially runs from 2014 to 2016.

Growth from 2021

According to statistics collected from th
PKP Beacon project
which was presented at th
Open Publishing Fest
with the title
Location of known journals using PKP’s Open Journal Systems
, OJS is currently being used by at least 25,000 journals across the world.
daily updated map
is available at the PKP site. PKP also released th
source dataset
(updated yearly) as a dataset in

Dataverse The Dataverse is an open source web application to share, preserve, cite, explore and analyze research data. Researchers, data authors, publishers, data distributors, and affiliated institutions all receive appropriate credit via a data citation w ...

and th
Beacon source code

PKP conferences

The PKP holds a biannual conference. The First PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on July 11–13, 2007 and the Second PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference was also held in Vancouver on July 8–10, 2009. The Third PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference was held in Berlin, Germany between 26 and 28 September 2011. The fourth PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference was held in Mexico City, Mexico on August 19–21, 2013. Notes on the presentations were recorded on a scholarly publishing blog for both the 2007 and 2009 conferences, and selected papers from the 2007 conference were published in a special issue of the online journal ''

First Monday ''First Monday'' is an American legal drama television series which aired on CBS during the midseason replacement from January 15 to May 3, 2002. The series centered on the U.S. Supreme Court. Like another 2002 series, '' The Court'', it was i ...

''. Papers from the 2009 conference are available in the inaugural issue of the journal ''Scholarly and Research Communication''. Last meeting was o
20th Nov in Barcelona

Software

The PKP's suite of software includes several separate, but inter-related applications to demonstrate the feasibility of open access: the Open Journal Systems, th
Open Preprint Systems
the

, the

(archived), and the

PKP Open Archives Harvester The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making thi ...

(archived). PKP briefly experimented with a new application, Lemon8-XML, but has since opted to incorporate the XML functionality into the existing applications. All of the products are

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

and freely available to anyone interested in using them. They share similar technical requirements (PHP, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Apache or Microsoft IIS 6, and a Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, or Windows operating system) and need only a minimal level of technical expertise to get up and running. In addition, the software is well supported with a free, online support forum and a growing body of publications and extensive documentation is available on th
project web site
Increasingly, institutions are combining the PKP software, using OJS to publish their research results, OCS to organize their conferences and publish the proceedings, and the OAI Harvester to organize and make the metadata from these publications searchable. Together with other open source software applications such as DSpace (for creating institutional research repositories), institutions are creating their own infrastructure for sharing their research output.

Open Monograph Press

Open Monograph Press, also known as OMP, is an open source software platform for managing and publishing scholarly books. OMP is released under the GNU General Public License.

Open Archives Harvester

The PKP Open Archives Harvester is software used to accumulate and index freely available

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

, providing a searchable, web-based interface. It is

, released under the GNU General Public License.Kellogg, D. (2004)
''Open Source OAI Metadata Harvesting Tools''
Retrieved November 30, 2006. Originally developed to harvest the metadata from Open Journal Systems articles and

proceedings, the Harvester can by used with any OAI-PMH-compliant resource. It can harvest metadata in a variety of schemas (including unqualified Dublin Core, the PKP Dublin Core extension, the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), and MARCXML). Additional schema are supported via plugins. The PKP OA Harvester allows any institution to create their own metadata harvester, which can be focused specifically on gathering information from or for their research community.

Involved parties

It is a partnership among the following entities: * Simon Fraser University Library * The University of British Columbia Library * Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University * University of Pittsburgh * Ontario Council of University Libraries * Graduate School of Education at

References

External links

Public Knowledge Project official site

Open Journal Systems

Open Conference Systems

PKP Open Archive Harvester

PKP Open Monograph Press

Installation manual
{{Authority control Academic journal online publishing platforms Academic publishing Open access projects Publication management software 1998 establishments in Canada