Public Knowledge Project
Background: The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) was founded in 1998 with the support of University of British Columbia Pacific Press Professorship. PKP has helped the academic community take charge of scholarly publishing in the digital era by developing open source software and an open source publishing platform. Its Open Journal Systems (OJS), launched in 2002, has been adopted by more than 40,000 journals in more than 130 countries. PKP software is available in more than 30 languages and is used to publish research in at least 60 languages.
Mission: PKP is committed to writing, maintaining, and releasing free and open source software publishing platforms and workflows to increase access to knowledge. PKP has a distributed model that encourages users to share its products and contribute code to boost regional technical capacities on a global scale.
Community over Commercialization:
“The concept of communities is central to the work of scholarship, and it's central to the work of PKP.”
“We have many different ways of conceiving of community. It’s not one community—it's many different communities that intersect with one another. We're an academic-led project that serves the scholarly community, and have always done so with the support of the library community, in addition to the software developers who contribute code that make the software available. PKP would not exist without the communities of editors, authors, readers, developers, and supporters who make up the PKP Community.”
“Community is central to the work that we do—just like it is central to the work of scholarship more broadly. Communities are at the heart of how research is done, how we build on each other's work, and how we come together to formulate ideas and come up with solutions to advance our thinking. Building knowledge happens in communities.”
“This concept of community over commercialization comes into play in how we make our software available so that communities around the world can make their voices and ideas heard—regardless of whether those ideas can be packaged into a profitable product to be sold in the market.”
“Open access should never just be about making the research available. We should retain loftier aspirations for open access that include both making all research accessible as well as ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to participate in sharing knowledge.”
“Centering the concept of community reminds us to focus on the people whose voices we want to be heard—those whose knowledge and ideas we want to make accessible. It's about more than free research or removing barriers to read and use. Community reminds us to be inclusive and find ways to have all voices be heard.”
“We need to make sure that communities are able to participate in open access on their own terms, and in ways that make sense for them.”
-Juan Pablo Alperin, Scientific Director, Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University, Canada