The Public Knowledge Project is calling for the community to support its mission of serving the quality, reach, and access of non-commercial scholarly publishing by joining the Financial Contributor Pathway.
As a free and open source (FOSS) project, our membership, through their participation in our committees, interest groups, and other venues including the Financial Contributor Pathway, serves as a vital mechanism for ensuring that PKP’s strategic direction and software development roadmaps remain closely aligned with the needs of our community of users and beneficiaries.
Membership fees account for nearly a third of our operating budget. We’re proud of this fact! This connection between membership and our governance structure and development directions is a deliberate and essential component of our approach.
PKP develops and maintains critical open infrastructure for the diamond open access future we all desire. Our flagship software, Open Journal Systems (OJS) is the backbone of over 34,000 journals worldwide, amounting to over 8 million published articles across 156 countries and in 60 languages1. OJS has been estimated to facilitate the publication of 60% of all diamond open access journals2.
In a practical sense, this means that even if your library or institution doesn’t have a publishing program built on PKP software, it undoubtedly serves students and scholars that benefit from the research articles that PKP played a critical role in making openly available. If you serve students and scholars who benefit from quality open access research, we invite you to consider becoming a member and supporting this mission through the Financial Contributor Pathway.
We know that libraries and institutions are regularly faced with challenging financial decisions. This is precisely the moment when support for open infrastructure should be prioritized. We must not only envision, but build a future where these difficult acquisition decisions are made obsolete by open infrastructures that breathe new life into non-commercial solutions to scholarly communications.
We are asking for a bold shift in priorities, divestment away from a scholarly communications system that has resulted in perennial funding crises, and invest in open infrastructure that presents fair, equitable, and sustainable solutions.
We have plans to further build, develop, and enhance our services. We’ve listened to our community and we are committed to improving our support for open peer review, for XML, for enhanced accessibility, for open data, for multilingualism, and for many other features. To do this work, we must secure consistent and proportionate funding that aligns with the value we deliver.
The future of scholarly publishing is now!
We hope you share our enthusiasm and will partner with us in crafting this collective vision for the future. To indicate your interest in becoming a PKP Member through the Financial Contributor Pathway, please complete this brief form.
1 Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: A modest step in a vast decolonization process
2 The OA Diamond Journals Study
