Following the sale of PeerJ, PKP reiterates that its design goes hand in hand with its commitment to free and open software forever.
The sale of the open access publisher PeerJ to Taylor & Francis is an opportunity to remind our communities of users why the Public Knowledge Project is not for sale and will not be sold.
PKP Principles
Since its inception, PKP has held the values of openness, inclusion, innovation, collaboration, and expanding the worldwide right to knowledge. We believe that upholding these principles starts with involving people who share these values, from the project’s distributed nature, and our transparent governance structure, to our open development efforts and hiring practices.
What’s more, is that PKP values the trust of its communities. We have been enhancing global scholarly publishing, stakeholder involvement, transparent governance, and sustainability, to name a few. Our principles are part of our design that ensures we will not be sold.
Distributed versus centralized
PKP supports software freedom. The project has always distributed its software under a GPL License (General Public License) that guarantees the freedom to use, study, modify, and distribute the software and that any work derived from the original software is subject to the same license terms.
PKP’s free and open source software (FOSS) cannot be closed to others’ use and will remain available as a common good on these terms to scholars and the academic community for, well, forever.
This license has made it possible for more than 40,000 NOT centralized journals distributed worldwide. PKP’s distributed model for FOSS publishing platforms, used by independent journals and small publishers, works against the common publishing model for building a coherent revenue-generating entity that others may want to acquire.
GPL also protects the freedom of users and protects the appropriation of developments. In other words, no matter what happens, anyone can access our software code, start a fork, and rebuild, with the resulting work still subject to the GPL.
Community involvement
Creating FOSS for open access publishing takes a community! It is not only about reducing production costs for institutions to disseminate research, but also about making knowledge creation and dissemination accessible to a wider community, allowing for richer academic conversations that include regions, languages, and researchers that would otherwise be excluded or overlooked. This mission is another reason why PKP will remain non-commercial and scholar-led.
PKP software (OJS, OMP, OPS) will always be free for all users, as it is maintained not only by PKP staff, but also fed by a large community that joins the efforts of thousands of institutions and individuals that develop, test, improve, give feedback, translate, and support it.
Governance and sustainability
While this mission is at the core of PKP’s work, the reality is that all projects have to be sustainable and find ways to preserve themselves over time, although this by no means means that they have to be commercial.
PKP’s sustainability relies on contributions from the organizations’ members, income from its hosting and other services, and research grants awarded to the project, ensuring that the project and its software remain free to all.
Another safeguard against a takeover is the expansion of our institutional support – support that is in line with a distributed and community-governed approach.
Since 2005, PKP has maintained a partnership with the Simon Fraser University Library, which has supported us as our administrative home ever since, and has only grown stronger over the years, so that as of 2022, PKP is part of SFU’s Core Facility Program, which encourages PKP to be available and open to academics and contributions from other universities.
PKP is an SFU Core Facility, which provides this university-led project with institutional backing. SFU, as a public university, safeguards the open and public character, financially and legally. This will enable us to maintain it over time without having to succumb to a commercial sale in search of sustainability.
The different Committees of PKP’s governance structure also include members from external and international organizations that share our core values and goals. This provides PKP with both autonomy and confidence that its community will support the project, no matter what.
Call to join in this community-led mission
In addition, this is a good occasion to thank all the people and organizations in the world that make it possible for this project to continue working to achieve its mission. Aware of the changing pace of the community, we reiterate our commitment to open access to knowledge, the principles of FOSS, and the inclusion of all people in our community.
We take the opportunity to invite all the people who want to join in this path to know the different ways in which they can contribute to this project, from PKP PS services and in-kind contributions in our groups to the options of financial and development contributions.
