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 nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

policies, and on developing strategies for making this possible. It is a partnership between the Faculty of Education at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...

, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a Public university, public research university in British Columbia, Canada. It maintains three campuses in Greater Vancouver, respectively located in Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, British Columbia, Surrey, and ...

, the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The university is composed of seventeen undergraduate and graduate schools and colle ...

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 re ...

, 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 ...

and the School of Education at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. 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 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 cit ...

British Columbia British Columbia is the westernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Situated in the Pacific Northwest between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains, the province has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...

, 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 The scholarly method or scholarship is the body of principles and practices used by scholars and academics to make their claims about their subjects of expertise as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly pu ...

(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 (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 university, public research university in Berlin, Germany. It was founded in West Berlin in 1948 with American support during the early Cold War period a ...

and two other institutions. Funding by the

German Research Foundation The German Research Foundation ( ; 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 Germany. In 2019, the DFG had a funding bud ...

(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 ...

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 of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

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

Mexico City Mexico City is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Mexico, largest city of Mexico, as well as the List of North American cities by population, most populous city in North America. It is one of the most important cultural and finan ...

Mexico Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in North America. It is the northernmost country in Latin America, and borders the United States to the north, and Guatemala and Belize to the southeast; while having maritime boundar ...

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''. Papers from the 2009 conference are available in the inaugural issue of the journal ''Scholarly and Research Communication''. The last meeting was o
20th Nov in Barcelona
and brought together a sprint and a conference attended by more than 160 participants from 25 countries around the world.

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

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 The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

Open Archives Harvester

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

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

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

, released under the

.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 Open Conference Systems 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 140px, Logo of DCMI, maintenance agency for Dublin Core Terms The Dublin Core vocabulary, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Terms (DCMT), is a general purpose metadata vocabulary for describing resources of any type. It was first developed ...

, 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

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