The Public Knowledge Project was initiated in 1998 by John Willinsky in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, Faculty of Education, UBC. It arose out of Willinsky’s work on the history of publishing and on postcolonial studies, as well as his experiences in educational software development at Knowledge Architecture, Inc. The first PKP software was launched in 2001, and through the technical leadership of Kevin Jamieson, the project went on to develop Open Journal Systems, Open Conference Systems and PKP Harvester under the GNU GPL open source license.

In 2002, OJS was added to the Timeline for the Open Access Movement as a Landmark Event. In 2005, Willinsky joined forces with Lynn Copeland, University Librarian, SFU Library and Rowly Lorimer, Director, Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing, SFU to greatly increase PKP’s ability to develop, sustain, and improve the software and support for online and open access publishing.

In 2007, PKP held its first conference, with international participation and the proceedings published in the special October 2007 issue of First Monday. Also in 2007, Willinsky took a position as Professor of Education at Stanford University, effectively giving PKP a fourth principal home, along with the SFU Library, SFU's Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing, and UBC's Faculty of Education.

Distinguished PKP Alumni
Jahanzaib Badar
Jason Chu
Michael Cranny
Azra Dabiri
Jennifer Erickson
Kingsley Fong
Keith Fuller
Vikram Goghari
Alnoor Gova
Rory Hansen
Kent den Heyer
Kevin Jamieson
Patrick Inglis
Randall Jonas
Henry Kang
Shula Klinger
Lisa Korteweg
Sam Ladner
Sal Muthayan
Deanna MacLeod
Bryan McKinnon
Daniel McLaren
Jane Mitchell
Florence Muinde
Miriam Orkar
Faith Shields
Michael Sutton
Shahbaz Tabyanian
Rob Wickert
Aaron Willinsky
Larry Wolfson
Eunice Yung