The Public Knowledge Project is a research and development initiative directed toward improving the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online publishing and knowledge-sharing environments. Begun in 1998 by Professor John Willinsky in the Faculty of Education at UBC, PKP has developed Open Journal Systems and Open Conference Systems, free software for the management, publishing, and indexing of journals and conferences, as well as Open Harvester Systems and Lemon8-XML to facilitate the indexing of research and scholarship. This open source software is being used around the world to increase access to knowledge and improve its scholarly management, while considerably reducing publishing costs. See Software for demos, downloads, and information about these systems.

Located at the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and Stanford University, PKP also sustains an active research program on the impact of increased access to knowledge, with the resulting publications,dating back to 1998, available from this site.