Public Knowledge Project Receives Arnold Grant

By Kevin Stranack

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is pleased to announce that it has received a six-month planning grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.  

Project web site: http://advancing-pkp.org/

This funding will enable PKP to commence a comprehensive review of its open source publishing software and related services to ensure they continue to address the evolving needs and interests of the international scholarly publishing and open access communities.  Closely intertwined with this is the critical requirement to determine how PKP’s current financial models can be strengthened to ensure that PKP can continue to support these communities well into the future.

First launched in 2001, PKP’s open source software Open Journal Systems (OJS) has grown into one of the world’s most widely used platforms for the management and publication of scholarly journals. There are currently over 10,000 journals using OJS and a recent survey suggests that 98% of these journals offer open access (OA) to their content, with 60% of the titles in Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia.  OJS owes its continuing success in large part to community support in many forms – code contributions, financial support, software translations, and user documentation.

Juan Pablo Alperin, PKP’s Associate Faculty Director of Research and the Principal Investigator on the study stated: “As the most widely used OSS platform for publishing Open Access journals, PKP feels a heightened sense of responsibility for making sure it can sustain its ongoing support for scholarly publishing in a way that is consistent with its mission and the values of the academic community.”

Brian Owen, PKP’s Managing Director added: “This study is especially timely in the context of growing concerns over the long-term viability of community-based infrastructure associated with the entire research lifecycle in light of the commercial acquisition of key players such as SSRN, Mendeley, and most recently bepress.”

For more information, please contact Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin at jalperin@sfu.ca.

About PKP

The Public Knowledge Project was established in 1998 at the University of British Columbia. Since that time PKP has expanded and evolved into an international and virtual operation with institutional anchors at Stanford University and Simon Fraser University Library. Open Journal Systems (OJS) is open source software made freely available worldwide for the purpose of making open access publishing a viable option for more scholars, as open access can increase a journal’s readership as well as its contribution to the public good on a global scale. More information about PKP, its software, and services is available at http://pkp.sfu.ca.

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