PKP held its Annual General Meeting (AGM) for the 2022 fiscal year on August 4th, 2023. The AGM recording is now available.
Marco Tullney, Chair of PKP’s Advisory Committee, started the meeting off by outlining the agenda, which included an introduction to the team and topics, celebration of PKP’s 25th anniversary, and acknowledgement of the community involved in making PKP an influential global research and advocacy project.
Annual Report highlights
PKP Operations Director Kevin Stranack gave Annual Report highlights, including Publishing Services achievements, event numbers, and the financial report for the 2022 fiscal year. Kevin celebrated the team, the community’s boldness, and the innovation in the work being done to increase quality, diversity and access to research globally.
PKP Publishing Services was developed on request by the community. These services continues to see an average 20% year-on-year growth in the number of publishers using Open Journal Systems for journal management and Open Monograph Press for online book publishing. PKP welcomed 142 new journals, presses, and servers, and 44 new hosted clients.
Although the organization is involved in many community-driven conferences, workshops and more during any given year, PKP Sprints continue to be a great source of community inspired productivity around developing the free and open source software that 30,000+ journals around the world use for independent scholarly publishing. Two Sprints were held over the period – one in Helsinki and one in Bogotá.
PKP benefits from support of funders such as the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as part of our Coalition Publica partnership with Érudit. We are also thankful for our members, partners, in-kind contributors, and event sponsors! Our Financial Contributors and full Financial Report have been listed in detail inside the Annual Report.
Research updates
Next up was Saurabh Khanna, Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University, sharing research on geography, language, discipline and visibility of journals using OJS, showing that diverse, quality research is being published globally that should not be left out of scholarly publishing narratives. The output has been published in the MIT Press Direct journal Quantitative Science Studies under the title of “Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: A modest step in a vast decolonization process.”
PKP’s Co-Scientific Director Juan Pablo Alperin highlighted how the Public Knowledge Project is a research endeavor at its core in that scholarly publishing ecosystems are constantly evolving and need to be understood in order to act.
Open science and science communication are central aspects of the work PKP does, and there are several research and advocacy efforts going on, including the VOICES project, Copyright Reform for OS, the Journal Integrity Initiative, Metadata for Everyone, and much more. Overviews of these research efforts are accessible at PKP Research and the Scholarly Communications Lab.
Development updates
Alec Smecher, Associate Director of Development, gave roadmap updates and discussed milestones, LTS, community testing, responsive developments and much more. He also underlined several features in 3.4.0 that were developed to enhance user experience and functionality. Finally, Alec also gave an overview of how the community comes together to make it all happen!
Thank you and materials
A big thank you to Simon Fraser University, our university home as a core research facility, and everyone who supports the Public Knowledge Project! There is not a single aspect of this project that is not touched by the community. PKP’s free and open-source software, and all of the intersecting work, are made possible thanks to you!
Access the AGM recording on YouTube
Get all the details in the Annual Report (pdf)
