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 this possible including software solutions. It is a partnership between the Faculty of Education at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thre ...

, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a public research university in British Columbia, Canada, with three campuses, all in Greater Vancouver: Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, and Vancouver. The main Burnaby campus on Burnaby Mountain, located ...

, the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the univers ...

Ontario Council of University Libraries The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) is an academic library consortium of Ontario’s 21 university libraries located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Formed in 1967, OCUL member institutions work together to maximize the expertise and r ...

, the

California Digital Library The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management a ...

and the School of Education at Stanford University. 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 Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

British Columbia British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

, based on his research in education and publishing. Willinsky is a leading advocate of open access 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 The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an international alliance of academic and research libraries developed by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998 which promotes open access to scholarship. The coalition c ...

(SPARC), the Brazilian Institute for Information Science and Technology (IBICT), and the

International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications INASP (International Network for Advancing Science and Policy) is an international development charity working with a global network of partners to improve access, production and use of research information and knowledge, so that countries are equ ...

(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 Open Journal Systems, also known as OJS, is a free software for the management of peer-reviewed academic journals, created by the Public Knowledge Project, and released under the GNU General Public License. History Open Journal Systems (OJS ...

(OJS), 50 conferences using Open Conference Systems (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 (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 The Free University of Berlin (, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public research university in Berlin, Germany. It is consistently ranked among Germany's best universities, with particular strengths in political science and t ...

and two other institutions. Funding by the German Research Foundation (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 and th
Beacon source code

PKP conferences

The PKP holds a biannual conference. The First PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference was held in

, 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 Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

, Germany between 26 and 28 September 2011. The fourth PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference was held in

Mexico City Mexico City ( es, link=no, Ciudad de México, ; abbr.: CDMX; Nahuatl: ''Altepetl Mexico'') is the capital city, capital and primate city, largest city of Mexico, and the List of North American cities by population, most populous city in North Amer ...

Mexico Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...

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

, th
Open Preprint Systems
the Open Monograph Press, the Open Conference Systems (archived), and the PKP Open Archives Harvester (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 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 DSpace is an open source repository software package typically used for creating open access repositories for scholarly and/or published digital content. While DSpace shares some feature overlap with content management systems and document manag ...

(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 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general ...

Open Archives Harvester

The PKP Open Archives Harvester is software used to accumulate and index freely available metadata, providing a searchable, web-based interface. It is open source, released under the

.Kellogg, D. (2004)
''Open Source OAI Metadata Harvesting Tools''
Retrieved November 30, 2006. Originally developed to harvest the metadata from

articles and Open Conference Systems proceedings, the Harvester can by used with any

OAI-PMH The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI- ...

-compliant resource. It can harvest metadata in a variety of schemas (including unqualified

Dublin Core 220px, Logo image of DCMI, which formulates Dublin Core The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has ...

, 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: *

Library * The

Library * Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at

* Graduate School of Education at Stanford University

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