PKP 2019 Five Reasons Why: #2 Open Access

By Marisa MacDonald

By now you’ve heard – PKP is heading to Barcelona in November for our Seventh International Scholarly Publishing Conference. Why should you join us? Maybe you use our software. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re a like-minded organization or one of our strategic partners. No matter your affiliation, if you support open access, you won’t want to miss the presentations to come at our opening reception (November 20) and two-day conference (November 21-22).

Many of you know us for our flagship software, Open Journal Systems (OJS), released in 2001. But our story is so much more than just software. OJS exists today because an education professor and his students, back in 1998, wanted to make knowledge public. Before the term “open access” became popularized in the early 2000s, our Founder and Director, John Willinsky, was conducting research and developing software that would facilitate open access publishing. He believed, as we still do today, that if you make the publishing process open, via open source software that anyone can download free of charge and with software that respects and maintains the scholarly publishing workflow, that you can, without a doubt, make knowledge public.

Our software is a part of who we are, but it is not all that we are. We continue to operate as an academic project (hence, the Public Knowledge Project) and though OJS takes up a great deal of our time, open access research and education are at the heart of who we are and what we do. After starting PKP, John went on to be a leader in the open access movement, writing The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship in 2006 and The Intellectual Properties of Learning, A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke in 2017. John’s latest work with LIBRARIA (a collective of researchers, editors, and learned societies members, in which PKP is playing a leadership role) is “Subscribe-to-Open” (formerly “Library + Funder”). This model for sustainable open access builds on PKP’s “Open Access Publishing Cooperative Feasibility Study” funded by the MacArthur Foundation from 2015-2017. It proposes an alternative for academic libraries: a simple and straightforward means of achieving open access based on best practices that are rooted in existing resources, journals, and processes.

With all that said, when PKP has a conference, you can ensure there will be plenty of open access conversations and presentations. This year, we’ve dedicated an entire track to open access topics. Even better, PKP 2019 is an international conference so you’ll get a global perspective of what it means to be open. To start us off, John will be present a talk at our opening reception on Wednesday, November 20th. On Thursday and Friday, conference registration includes keynote speeches by local open access advocates Reme Melero and Ignasi Labastida. Three equally fabulous speakers, Abel Packer (SciELO), Tara Robertson (Mozilla), and Katherine Skinner (Educopia) will also be keynotes.

Our full program won’t be ready until the end of August, but we can already guarantee if you “heart” open access, you’ll be fully engaged at PKP 2019. Visit our website for more information and to register.

If open access values are at the heart of your work, then we have something in common. Contributions to PKP, including donations, business from our Publishing Services division, and any additional revenue from PKP 2019, enable us to – through research, education, and software – make knowledge public.

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