Public Knowledge Project
The Public Knowledge Project is a non-profit research initiative of the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, and the Simon Fraser University Library. It 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.
The PKP was founded in 1998 by Dr. John Willinsky 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. Dr. Willinsky is a leading advocate of open access publishing, and has written extensively on the value of public research.
The PKP has developed three open source software applications to demonstrate the feasibility of open access: the Open Journal Systems, the Open Conference Systems, and the PKP Open Archives Harvester.
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 Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia (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 similar projects in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Vietnam.
Increasingly, institutions are seeing the value of 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 searchable the metadata from these publications. 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.
A growing body of publications and documentation is available on the project web site.
The PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference will be held in Vancouver, BC, Canada on July 11 - 13, 2007.
References
Blackmore, J. (2003). Tracking the Nomadic Life of the Educational Researcher: What Future for Feminist Public Intellectuals and the Performative University? The Australian Educational Researcher, 30 (3), 1-24.