After months of community consultations, analysis of input from the Community Forum and Beacon data, collaboration across every PKP team, and drawing on deep expertise in book publishing, PKP’s OMP Coordinator, Zoe Wake Hyde, has released her Final Report.

In OMP Under the Spotlight, Zoe explores the central question:

“How does, can, and should PKP contribute to a thriving open book publishing ecosystem?”

The report lays out a clear vision for OMP’s future. One that responds to the diverse needs of our growing user community, whether they are publishing scholarly books, theses, dissertations, reports, creative works, or running institutional publishing programs, library presses, open educational resources, or independent projects.

Zoe’s vision highlights:

• Integration with scholarly publishing infrastructures to ensure alignment with good practices and broad discoverability
• Leverage of PKP’s position and reputation in the open community
• Leadership as stewards of critical open infrastructure
• Experience working closely with open source contributors
• Revenue generation through hosted clients, sponsored development funding, and grants
• Position as a site for research into & education around open scholarly publishing

From this foundation, Zoe develops a roadmap to bring OMP to closer parity with OJS, addressing user needs through innovations in chapter handling, publication types, accessibility, theming, press settings, and terminology.

For full details, we encourage you to read the complete report.

The post OMP Under the Spotlight: Final report appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

In this segment of Archipelago, explore the recap of events since August 2025. From the IFLA Congress in Kazakhstan to the latest OASPA conference and more, there is a lot to be excited about.

IFLA World Library and Information Congress

August 18-22, Astana, Kazakhstan

PKP’s Scholarly Publishing Advisor, Mariya Maistrovskaya, joined the 89th IFLA Congress with her presentation “It Takes a Village: How Library Contributions to Open Infrastructure Shape Global Open Science” highlighting how library-led contributions to open platforms and collaborative support structures are helping grow a sustainable, scalable, and interoperative scholarly landscape. 

“This was my first time at IFLA WLIC and I was blown away by the diversity of countries, libraries, and perspectives that the conference brought together. I have had so many conversations with folks I would have never met otherwise. And despite this not being a publishing-specific conference, I was amazed to discover that PKP was well known and recognized among the attendees I spoke with. I was happy to have been a part of the discussions about open infrastructure, open science, scholarly communications, and publishing.” Mariya Maistrovskaya, PKP, Scholarly Publishing Advisor

Keep an eye on their repository, full slides and write-up coming up soon.

PKP Development News Webinar

Monday, September 15

Hosted quarterly throughout the year, these events feature experts from the PKP Development Team and offer insights into features and enhancements that are currently in development for OJS, OMP, and OPS. These events are of interest to Strategic Partners, Development Partners, Financial Contributors, and Community Contributors, as well as the wider community.

Watch the recording

CERN Open Science Fair

September 15-17,  CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

Scientific Director, Juan Pablo Alperin participated in the panel “Open Research Europe: A Catalyst towards Equitable Publishing”, where the panelists dialogued about the po tengial of the ORE platform along with the roles, motivations, perspectives and expectations of organisations that participate in this initiative, and explored the advancement of equitable publishing in Europe by focusing on the example of Open Research Europe (ORE).

Watch the recording here.

NISO Plus 2025

September 16-17

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) held its annual conference, which welcomed the presentation “Developing a New Community Standard: PKP’s Publication Facts Label” by PKP founder John Willinsky, Jane Taylor, Hannah Hechner Swain, and Alice Meadows. The presentation examined the challenges and opportunities for the Publishing Facts Label (PFL), which aims to provide standardized information on key elements of journal articles within the context of the journal in which they’re published and the broader group of journals utilizing the label, to become accepted as an industry standard.

 OASPA Annual Conference

September 22-24, Belgium

The panel “Scaling inclusive open access Models”  at the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association’s 2025 conference included Juan Pablo Alperin, PKP’s Scientific Director, in a thought-provoking dialogue about models, partnership opportunities, and different ways to sustain more inclusive models for open access

The post Featured Events Recap appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

PKP’s Community Engagement and Outreach Associate Director, Urooj Nizami, interviews OBC’s Managing Director, Joe Deville, to explore OBC’s origins, purpose, and relationships, as well as OMP and the open book publishing landscape, among other fascinating stories. 

Over the past year, Open Monograph Press (OMP), PKP’s book publishing software, has found itself riding a fresh wave of momentum. A big part of that energy comes from the Open Book Collective (OBC), whose support has helped spark new possibilities for the platform.

With OBC’s support, our OMP Coordinator, Zoe Wake Hyde, and the team have been able to think bigger and bolder about the future of OMP. On the horizon are improvements that get right to the heart of what makes a book a book: smarter chapter handling for richer metadata, smoother submission processes, and more intuitive workflows.

This collaboration offers more than just technical advancement, it’s about reshaping the open access book publishing landscape. Together with our communities, PKP and OBC are building the infrastructure, tools, and shared vision needed to reimagine what scholarly publishing can be when it’s open and built by the communities it serves.

Interview with Joe Deville, Managing Director of the Open Book Collective

1. Could you share the origin story of the Open Book Collective? What inspired its creation?

Very happy to. Of course, with something like the Open Book Collective, there isn’t just one origin story, but many. However, my personal involvement in what became the Open Book Collective can be traced back to a series of conversations that were happening in the 2010s between some independent open access academic-led book publishers, which included my own publisher – Mattering Press – as well as publishers such as Open Book Publishers, punctum books, Meson Press and others. What we were engaged with was trying to think how we could collaborate together and to scope out what the major challenges were that we were collectively facing as small, or at least smaller, open access book publishers. 

These conversations in due course led to an ultimately successful funding application to an organisation called OpenAIRE, to fund a project titled New Platforms for open access Book Distribution. We were extremely surprised that we were successful and very grateful of course. Over and above the specific project outputs, out of that project, came at least a key principle: that it was really vital for the future of open access book publishing that we invested deeply in collaboration over competition. We saw our competition as not each other, but the far larger range of commercial publishers in the ecosystem that were, in many ways, gobbling up many of the infrastructures and spaces for scholarly communication, including those for open access. We also started to think through what concrete solutions needed to be in place to address some of the challenges we identified. One of those was an idea for some kind of intermediary or platform that could scale the kind of diamond open access funding models that other publishers – Open Book Publishers and punctum books for example – had successfully developed. 

These conversations, alongside others happening elsewhere – and here I have to credit colleagues like Janneke Adema who really drove this forward, building party on her work in establishing the Radical open access Collective, led in due course to an application, to the Research England Development Fund and Arcadia for the project that would become in due course COPIM, standing for Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs. This project included a specific area of work focused on developing the aforementioned intermediary. 

Now we didn’t know what that intermediary would be and it took a long time to really work out how it’d work and how it would be governed, amongst other things. But fundamentally, it was rooted in the principle that it was vitally important to develop approaches that were collaborative rather than competitive. And I like to think that in many ways the Open Book Collective is a manifestation of that principle.

2. How did your background in sociology and science and technology studies influence your engagement with open access publishing? 

So partly the answer to that question lies in the origins of my own press, Mattering Press, that I was involved in co-founding. Mattering Press is a small scholar-led, open access book publisher, producing works in and around the field of science and technology studies. My colleagues and I set up that press because at that particular time, we noted that, while there existed a number of interesting open access journals, there was nothing really in our field for the publication of longform science and technology studies works. Based on little more than this insight, we set about – with little knowledge or understanding of publishing, let alone open access publishing – in establishing the press. 

In retrospect, this seems hopelessly naive. But there are broader reasons why an engagement between sociology and science and technology studies and open access is important, some of which have only become clearer to me as I’ve worked in the field. And here it’s worth noting that, for me, the promise of open access is not an entirely straightforward one. In actual fact, my Mattering Press colleague Endre Danyi and I, in the very early days of the press, wrote about this in calling for a focus on ‘openings’ rather than openness as an unqualified ‘good’. We can see, for example, how the ways open access is sometimes talked about has overlaps with certain facets of libertarian politics. 

For me, this is where both insights from both sociology and science and technology studies are important. From sociology, I have drawn an interest in the very real inequalities of scholarly publishing. From science and technology studies, I have become interested in thinking about the infrastructures of open access publishing. This field has looked at the specific role of infrastructures in a variety of contexts, including digital infrastructures, and the often underappreciated politics of those infrastructures. 

During the COPIM project, I, in close collaboration with my colleague Eileen Joy from punctum books, sought to put some of these principles to work, recognising that whatever we produced – what would become the Open Book Collective – would inevitably be a political intervention. So, for example, we ensured that we really prioritised the support of groups of initiatives via the Open Book Collective rather than encouraging potentially supporting universities to pick and choose between different entities – the latter would be to create something more akin to a conventional marketplace, which we were keen to avoid. And we also saw that this is also reflected, I think, in the way the Open Book Collective is governed – but I will come back to this later. 

3. What do you see as the relationship between critical technology studies and the engaged practice of open publishing and what is the imperative to support open infrastructures in building the open access future so many of us envision?

So the answer to this question very much carries on from what I was just talking about, as another part of the context that was informing much of our thinking in the early days of what would become the COPIM project was the fact that so many of the infrastructures of scholarly communication were ending up in the hands of large, highly commercial organisations (I increasingly hesitate to call them ‘publishers’). For me, the kinds of open access I am keen to support focus not just on making scholarly communication open, but also on making the infrastructures of scholarly communication open – and partly this is to do with ensuring that they are open source, but there is more to it than simply that – and they are community-led and community governed. Too often, we’ve seen promising open access infrastructure initiatives emerge and then being bought up by large commercial organisations. I’ve talked about this in some of the talks that I’ve given recently, but obvious examples include the purchase of Knowledge Unlatched by Wiley and Ubiquity Press by DeGruyter Brill.

For us it’s really important to support open infrastructures that provide an alternative to these kinds of commercial infrastructures. And this includes infrastructures with protections in place to prevent these kinds of acquisitions from happening. That’s something that we’ve sought to do with the Open Book Collective’s detailed and robust governance structure and in our registration as a charity in the UK. And it’s something that we continually advocate for other open infrastructure providers to be doing.

4. What is so distinctive about the book or monograph as a medium that drew OBC’s focus?

I’m a social scientist, working across the disciplines of sociology, science and technology studies and organisation studies. And within these disciplines, as in many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, the monograph or the book remains perhaps the most centrally important format. However, at the start of the work that I and my colleagues were involved with as part of the COPIM and its successor, Copim’s Open Book Futures project, it remains the case that there are far fewer options for publishing longform works open access, as there are for publishing shorter form, particularly journal articles, open access. 

For me and other project colleagues, it is a format that needs to be protected. It’s a format that requires specific infrastructures. These include funding infrastructures, of course – and the Open Book Collective is only one such infrastructure – but also infrastructures that help with the production of books – OMP is of course a vital tool in this respect – and with management of metadata and book dissemination – Thoth Open Metadata and DOAB / OAPEN are excellent examples. And it’s a format that has a quite different temporality to the journal article, which makes the author / institution pays model – the Book Processing Charge, the longform version of the Article Processing Charge – arguably even more unsuited. We have argued that the book processing charge is fundamentally not fit for purpose when it comes to being a model for supporting open access book publishing.

5. What core values and frameworks underpin OBC’s mission and vision?

I’ve already talked about how important supporting the longform texts is. So here I’ll just highlight a few other core values. One is a real commitment to bibliodiversity. We think it’s really important that the scholarly system as a whole has in place mechanisms to support different kinds of publishers, producing different kinds of texts, working in different kinds of languages, using different formats, amongst many other possible points of variation. Practically, we look to support this value through the kinds of publishers and infrastructure providers that we have as members, but also in other ways. For example, we will soon be launching our website as multilingual and are really focusing on bringing on board more non-English language presses, to join our first predominantly non-Anglo press, Verlag Barbara Budrich. 

Another really important principle is what we call ‘scaling small’, which we counterpose to approaches that look to scale up. One of the achievements of the Open Book Collective, I think, is to begin to democratise the diamond open access funding model. Up until the existence of the Open Book Collective it simply wasn’t feasible or practicable for smaller initiatives – such as my own, Mattering Press, but also a number of other open access presses – to run their own, independent diamond open access programmes. What we do at the Open Book Collective is take on the work of hosting this kind of programme. This includes both administering them, including dealing with the resulting financial flows, and doing the outreach necessary to generate support for those programmes. This is no small task and to my mind embodies this principle of scaling small, in that it brings together members from a variety of different contexts into one space and provides a single offer to supporting universities, while sustaining each initiative individually. 

6. How does OBC see the future of open publishing, and what role does it hope to play in that landscape?

Here it’s worth highlighting that the Open Book Collective is a key partner on Copim’s second project, the Open Book Futures project, which I already mentioned. The project has this question – of the future of scholarly communication – very much at its heart. 

I would very much agree with my other project colleagues that we see this future as one where we are having an increasingly resilient network of community-led open infrastructure providers, collaborating together with open access publishers to deliver a bibliodiverse and financially sustainable way of doing open access publishing, producing texts of the highest quality with field leading standards of metadata quality, with rigorous peer review (and that, to me, does not necessarily mean conventional, double blind peer review), which then flow freely and easily to a wide variety of different spaces (one of the huge advantages of open access texts of course, is their ability to move freely in scholarly space because of their open licence. And we know that open access texts, for example, are cited far more than their closed access equivalents). What is striking to me is how close we already are to seeing at least the key building blocks for delivering this future in place – I like to think the Open Book Collective is one such building block, but there are certainly others: PKP, obviously, and our project colleagues OAPEN / DOAB and Thoth Open Metadata, but also emerging initiatives like the Open Journals Collective. 

7. In your view, how does OMP address a gap or meet a need in the open book publishing landscape?

I’ve really witnessed first hand the potential that OMP has, particularly in my recent engagements with colleagues in Africa. I’ve worked particularly closely with colleagues at the University of Cape Town and the African Platform for Open Scholarship, and I’ve seen that amongst its members, OMP is offering them an absolutely vital route for sustaining themselves, in many cases, as a librarian-led open access book publisher. I have seen the ways that OMP makes it far, far easier for them to manage their workflows and then potentially also to get the books into those dissemination channels. This, for me, really demonstrates the potential of open, freely available, robust open infrastructures for scholarly communication. 

8. Which communities and networks does OBC most actively engage with?

I suppose that one of the features of our work is that we are routinely engaging with different sides of the publishing ecosystem. So obviously we are engaging with publishers and infrastructure providers – talking to them about how we work, what our membership criteria are, exploring whether they could benefit from collaborating with the Open Book Collective, and so on. And then of course we are engaging with libraries and sometimes their representatives, particularly library consortia – similarly, exploring opportunities for collaboration and explaining our model and our values. 

Much of this work happens in a broadly Global North context. But as I’ve alluded to already, we also engage much more broadly. One of the particular features of the Open Book Collective is our annual small grants programme – the Collective Development Fund – that publishers and networks interested in expanding their open access book publishing work can apply to. We have a requirement that at least 30% of funds awarded should go to projects that benefit lower and middle income networks or initiatives. In our first round of funding in 2024, we comfortably exceeded that threshold and we expect to do so again in our current second round, the recipients of which will be announced later this year. 

So in this respect, our terrain is, I suppose, global. And it is also multilingual. We released our recent Collective Development Fund calls in not just English but also French, Portuguese and Spanish. And we also have recently increased the multilingualism of our team. We were really pleased to take on board a new colleague recently: Arturo Garduño-Magaña, who has joined as our Metadata Management Associate. As part of this work, he is really spearheading our engagement in Latin American and Spanish language contexts, which is something I am really excited to follow in the coming months. 

Of course, there is still a lot more work to do. The Open Book Collective remains relatively new and is still unknown in many quarters of the scholarly landscape. This is why I’m very grateful for these kinds of opportunities to talk about our work. 

9. In your time with OBC, what has most surprised you?

I’ll be quite honest here, I think what surprised me the most is that the model works. Of course, I hoped and believed that it could. But at the start of our work, I genuinely did not know whether any universities would take what we are trying to do seriously. Our first subscription was from the University of Manchester and they decided to support what was then our entire package. I can’t express how happy we were to receive that first subscription – and from what is a highly respected university in a UK context. It was a real moment of validation of some of the arguments that we have been putting forward for some time. 

Now we are in a position where we have raised over £1million [circa $1.35million / CAD$ 1.85million / €1.15million] in commitments for our publisher and infrastructure provider members, which continues to astonish me when I see it written down. However, it is a little bit misleading: there is still a huge amount of work still to be done, both to fully secure our own future, without recourse to external grant funding, and to further support our members. But I think what we have shown is more than just a proof of concept: models like the Open Book Collective really can succeed in being transformative of the conditions of scholarly communication.

10. How can institutions best support OBC and, in turn, the publishers and infrastructure it so effectively helps sustain?

As I’ve mentioned, a key part of our advocacy is directly to academic libraries and we hugely welcome the support that libraries and consortia are able to provide to us. This in many ways, of course, is the bottom line. But there are a far wider range of ways that library colleagues can support us if their university or their colleagues are not yet in a position to be able to sign off on this support. This can include simply inviting us to engage with your colleagues, to allow us to answer their questions and to enable us to present the work we are doing and the rationale behind it. It could also include engaging with the various calls that we make for collaboration – for example, to support the reviewing of Collective Development Fund applications – or our webinars and workshops.

But even more broadly than that, colleagues in various parts of the scholarly ecosystem can support us just by being open to thinking about what scholarly publishing is and how it should be funded. In the pitches we make to universities we of course do make clear how we are directly relevant to them, to their staff, and to their library strategies. But we also make clear that supporting the Open Book Collective and our publisher and service provider members is about more than just that: it is also about the urgent need to support the wider global open access ecosystem. So I think having and helping foster an openness to those kinds of arguments and to thinking of scholarly publishing not in terms of a service relationship but a space for genuine, mutual collaboration. So yes, please do come to us with an open mind. This is perhaps most important of all, in the final analysis.

Thank you, Joe, for this very insightful and thought provoking interview. You’ve really painted a picture of OBC, the collaborative nature, the impacts of infrastructure on knowledge sharing, and the importance of supporting that infrastructure, as well as some fascinating stories.

___

Our relationship with OBC has given us the chance to take a fresh, thoughtful look at OMP. It’s encouraged us to think more deeply about accessibility and usability, and has opened up a more direct, meaningful connection with the community we serve. We’re truly grateful to OBC for the insight, collaboration, and care you’ve brought to this work. Looking ahead, we’re excited to continue building on this momentum, together, toward more inclusive, distributed, responsive, and community driven publishing tools.

Open Book Collective releases testimonial video

Watch “Open Book Collective in action: Hear from our community: “We are excited to share a new testimonial video about building a fairer and more sustainable future for scholarly books featuring Joe Deville (Mattering Press Trustee & OBC Managing Director), Janneke Adema (Associate Professor in Digital Media, Coventry University), Juan Pablo Alperin (Scientific Director, Public Knowledge Project), Kaitlin Thaney (Executive Director, Invest in Open Infrastructure), Josiline Phiri Chigwada (University Librarian, Chinhoyi University of Technology), and Francois van Schalkwyk (Managing Trustee, African Minds). Filmed at the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access at the University of Cape Town, December 2024.”

This news came from OBC’s newsletter. Sign up to OBC’s newsletter for more updates like this! 

The post Open Book Collective and Open Monograph Press: An Interview with Joe Deville appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

PKP extends heartfelt thanks to Sonya Betz for her term as Chair of PKP’s Member Committee and welcomes Stephanie Savage.

PKP extends its sincere thanks to Sonya Betz, Acting Associate University Librarian at the University of Alberta as she concludes her two-year term as inaugural Chair of PKP’s Members Committee (MC) this October.

Under Sonya’s thoughtful leadership, the Members Committee was established as a key body guiding the strategic direction of PKP’s interest groups, offering advice, support, and consultation to ensure the success of special projects, events, and ongoing initiatives.

We are grateful that Sonya will continue to share her expertise as an active member of the Committee.

It’s been a pleasure chairing the Members Committee, and engaging in this important work with colleagues from 7 countries and 4 continents! I’ve learned so much about how scholarly publishing functions in other regions, and better understand the truly global impact of PKP on the publishing ecosystem. Many thanks to PKP for supporting me in this role, and to my colleagues on the Members’ Committee for your commitment to this work.” — Sonya Betz

Members Committee progress

During her tenure, Sonya facilitated discussions on critical issues, provided actionable feedback integrated into PKP’s operations, and oversaw significant achievements.

Over the past two years, the MC has strengthened education programs through advising on content, focus group and Summer Jam planning, and the launch of new interest groups and events.

To add, the MC improved UI / UX feedback processes with new mechanisms to better integrate feedback. Further, the MC contributed to PKP’s strategic direction through input on vision, mission, values, and local engagement initiatives.

The MC also bolstered cross-committee collaboration, welcomed new members, launched the DocsHub Working Group, and engaged directly on the future of Open Monograph Press (OMP).

PKP extends a heartfelt thanks to Sonya for her outstanding leadership!

Welcome, Stephanie Savage!

We are pleased to welcome Stephanie Savage, Scholarly Communications and Copyright Services Librarian at the University of British Columbia (UBC), as the new Chair beginning in October 2025.

Stephanie Savage (MA, MLIS) is a Scholarly Communications and Copyright Services Librarian at the University of British Columbia. In her role, she provides copyright education to the university community and helps researchers navigate the publication process while encouraging the adoption of open practices and dissemination strategies.

Stephanie is also an advocate for user rights and has conducted research on libraries’ role in legislative reform and possible legislative solutions to further open access. Additionally, Stephanie is the technical lead for Open Journal Systems (OJS) at UBC and provides publishing support to over 40 student and faculty journals. She is looking forward to working more closely with PKP via the Members Committee and hopes to continue the collaborative and user-centric work that this group supports.

Welcome, Stephanie!

The post Members Committee: Thank you Sonya Betz; welcome Stephanie Savage! appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

PKP honours long-time Director of Operations, Kevin Stranack, for his dedication to the project, the team, and the communities he has worked to serve. Learn more about Kevin’s story and his time with PKP in this interview with Urooj Nizami.

A tribute to a career that inspired

What PKP’s Director of Operations Kevin Stranack needs on his forthcoming retirement from PKP is not an introduction but an expression of our appreciation for the difference he has made across a great many fronts from all of us. It is not just that Kevin has seen it all at the Public Knowledge Project over the last two decades. Rather, he’s been a major cause of why it all happened as well as it has over the years. This is due to the caring, thoughtful, and principled ways in which Kevin has indispensably helped PKP serve the greater global community of scholarly publishing. 

In fact, what should be introduced here is how Kevin’s stepping into this project (along with Brian, Alec, and Juan in that early period) formed the real starting point of the PKP that people turn to today. For example, what Kevin, as a talented adult educator, developed and made a success was PKP School and related educational components that are now integral to PKP’s service to its community. But it’s not just this project that has been enhanced by Kevin’s tireless contributions. Rather, it is also all us who have been enhanced by, just as we have benefited from, the opportunity to work with such a remarkable individual.

– John Willinsky, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, and PKP Founder

Today, PKP is stronger than ever and well equipped for the future. Kevin’s dedication and his welcoming kindness have contributed massively to PKP being a trusted partner to many around the globe. I am thankful for his leadership and his care for the people WHO make up PKP.

– Marco Tullney, Head of Publication Services, Technische Informationsbibliothek and Chair of PKP’s Advisory Committee

The story and the journey: In Kevin’s words

1. What’s your PKP origin story? (How did you first hear about PKP and what drew you in?)

I first heard about PKP as a graduate student in Library and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia in 2001. I was part of a student project trying to build an open source XML authoring system for free newsletter publishing (what were to become blogs) and was told about OJS over in the Faculty of Education. It was more focused on scholarly workflow than document creation, but I found what John Willinsky was doing there fascinating.

2. How long have you been with PKP?

This is my 20th year with PKP. I was working at the Simon Fraser University Library on other open source projects (CUFTS, GODOT, dbWiz) when PKP moved from UBC to SFU, and I was asked to get involved.

3. When did you come to understand the breadth of PKP’s impact?

I knew PKP was something special early on, but my full understanding of its impact came from helping to organize the first PKP conference back in 2007. The incredible line-up of speakers, funders, and participants really let me know what a big deal PKP was. It changed how I thought about my work from then on.

4. Do you remember your very first day at PKP? Can you tell us about what stood out to you in those early days?

My first task for PKP was to do a thorough test of the brand new OJS 2 using a testing matrix, probably written by John. It was a deep immersion into the various roles and stages of scholarly publishing. As a new librarian, I was familiar with the basics, but this provided an education beyond anything I learned in grad school.

5. Over the years, how many different roles or hats have you worn at PKP?

In those early days, there was just John as the founder and visionary, Brian Owen (then Associate University Librarian for Systems at the SFU Library, now retired) as Managing Director, Alec Smecher as the developer, and me as the community person. In that role I did software testing, documentation creation, technical support, communications, graphic design, sales, marketing, community outreach, conference organizing, curriculum development, workshop instruction, membership development, business development, and many other things. We were a small but mighty team!

6. Do you remember your first PKP-related work trip? Where did you go, and what was that experience like?

I think my first work trip would have been to visit our friends at Érudit at the Université de Montréal. It was my introduction to the incredible work they were doing in XML publishing, and my task was to give them an introduction to OJS 2. I had no idea how deep our relationship would run, how we would create the Coalition Publica partnership together (one of only a handful of research projects recognized by the Canadian government as “Major Science Initiatives”), nor how much the people working there would come to mean to me twenty years later.

7. What would you say is your proudest accomplishment or an initiative that’s especially close to your heart?

That is difficult to narrow down! I’m probably proudest of my work with Brian Owen to create the sustainable organizational and financial structure that PKP continues to benefit from today, consisting of the four pillars of home institution support, memberships, social enterprise, and grants. Completing the POSI assessment really demonstrated how mature PKP has become as an organization. 

Closest to my heart would have to be the creation of PKP School, which continues to mean a great deal to me as a platform for building capacity and helping to diversify participation in scholarly publishing.

8. In meetings, I’ve picked up on the fact that you sometimes take notes by hand. Have you held onto all your PKP notebooks? Any idea how many you’ve filled over the years?

Yes, that is a practice I developed from my first librarian job, well before I would have had any kind of mobile device to take to meetings. I average about 3-4 per year, so that would be about 60 notebooks over the years.

9. If we were making a PKP blooper reel, what moment would definitely make the cut?

For the first PKP conference, we had no way of transferring money for meal and taxi expenses to invited international delegates, so I ended up going to the airport with envelopes stuffed with cash, and handing them out as people arrived. I’m surprised I didn’t get arrested.

10. What are some key lessons you’ve learned during your time at PKP? What surprised you most?

This might sound cheesy, but it truly is amazing how much a small, dedicated group of people can accomplish with the right mix of vision, skills, and determination; and how close you come to those people despite only rarely seeing them in-person.

11. From your vantage point, what’s changed most about PKP over the years?

The biggest change would be the scale of our activities. We are a much bigger team, from 4 when I joined to over 40 now, and the size of the community we are serving. 55,000 journals actively using OJS would have been unthinkable in the beginning.

12. Any exciting plans for retirement?

I enjoy a nice, simple life here on the prairies, so nothing too exciting. My plan is to just spend more time on the things I enjoy, like walking the dogs with my wife along Wascana Creek, exploring back roads of Western Canada with my sons, photography, woodworking, gardening, meditation, reading, and such.

That sounds wonderful, and we wish you all the best in your retirement. Thank you so much, Kevin, for taking us on this journey with you, from PKP’s humble beginnings to the global pillar for free and open source publishing it is now. You will be missed, but your contributions and leadership will continue to foster purposeful growth for many years to come!

The post Honouring Kevin Stranack: Looking back with one of PKP’s longest-serving trailblazers who helped make PKP a success story appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

https://doi.org/10.64000/r2zgm-99706
Crossref and PKP gear up for collaboration on enriched metadata, interoperability, community engagement around upgrading, and educational resources.

Crossref and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have been working closely together for many years, sharing resources and supporting our overlapping communities of organisations involved in communicating research. Now we’re delighted to share that we have agreed on a new set of objectives for our partnership, centred on further development of the tools that our shared community relies upon, as well as building capacity to enable richer metadata registration for organisations using the Open Journal Systems (OJS).

Crossref is working towards the vision of a rich and open network underpinning global scholarship, making relationships between works, people, institutions, and actions visible, thanks to the thread of metadata – the research nexus. This vision depends upon the participation of research communication organisations coming from all parts of the world, disciplines, and languages. Working with PKP towards making tools for metadata registration more comprehensive, accessible, and easier to use is a big step towards supporting our community to participate in the research nexus.

The renewed partnership has three main goals:

• Developments to improve experience and support metadata registration workflows in OJS, bringing relevant functionalities together under the Crossref plug-in, and developing an OMP Crossref plug-in.
• Joint community engagement in support of transitioning OJS users to the future Long-Term Support (LTS) version of OJS, which will enable richer metadata registration.
• Creation of a PKP School self-paced training course for system administrators.

Crossref and PKP have a rich history of collaboration, including previous investment in tools development in 2020, which resulted in some vital improvements to Crossref metadata management in OJS and a more streamlined experience for Crossref members on the platform, as well as many collaborative community events and training.

We know that thousands of Crossref members use OJS to register their metadata. Many are based in resource-constrained institutions, so the training provided by Crossref and PKP will be key to building their capacity to participate in the research nexus. With OJS 3.5 empowering organisations to register richer metadata, we look forward to opening up more opportunities for members to enhance their participation.

At PKP, we’re excited to deepen our longstanding collaboration with Crossref, supporting our global community in amplifying the visibility and impact of their research through streamlined integration for robust metadata management. By working together on both technological innovation and capacity-building initiatives, we anticipate even greater outcomes that will strengthen open scholarship throughout the duration of this partnership and well into the future.”
– Kevin Stranack, PKP Director of Operations.

About Crossref

Crossref runs an open infrastructure to link research objects, entities, and actions, creating a lasting and reusable scholarly record that underpins open science. Together with their 23,000 members in 163 countries, Crossref drives metadata exchange and supports nearly 2 billion monthly API queries, facilitating global research communication, for the benefit of society.

About PKP

Public Knowledge Project (PKP) seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality, reach, and diversity of academic research through the research, development, implementation, and support of innovative open source software to support scholarly publishing and communication.

The post Crossref and PKP enter new partnership phase to support richer and more inclusive metadata appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

The Public Knowledge Project, a Core Research Facility of Simon Fraser University (SFU), invites applications for the position of Managing Director.

PKP is the world’s leading developer of open source (free) software for scholarly publishing—including Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Monograph Press (OMP), and Open Preprint Systems (OPS)—and is an internationally recognized research and advocacy organization advancing sustainable and equitable open access to research.

The Role

The Managing Director closely collaborates with the Scientific Director to provide strategic and operational leadership for PKP. This role oversees aspects of operations, finance, and personnel management, with responsibility for ensuring PKP’s long-term sustainability and continued global impact.

The Managing Director will:

• Lead, mentor, and inspire a diverse and distributed team of ~30 professionals across three continents, including software engineers, social scientists, and publishing specialists.
• Develop and implement policies, programs, and procedures to foster an inclusive, supportive, and respectful team environment that reflects PKP’s values of equity, diversity, and global knowledge exchange.
• Partner with Scientific and Associate Directors to develop and implement strategic plans, set priorities, and pursue new initiatives that strengthen PKP’s leadership in scholarly communication.
• Oversee operations, providing focus and setting priorities for budget, staff, grants, and projects, while taking responsibility for financial matters, as well as the hiring, developing, and dismissal of personnel.
• Oversee budget management, business development, service delivery, and partner engagement.
• Build and maintain productive relationships with university, national, and international bodies and organizations, representing PKP as a thought leader in open infrastructure and open science.
• Prepare and manage grant and funding proposals among national and international, public and private funding bodies.

The Ideal Candidate

This position will appeal to an experienced leader who thrives on:

• Team leadership: motivating, supporting, developing, and coordinating diverse, distributed teams; building a culture of trust, respect, growth, and collaboration.
• Strategic management: balancing vision with execution, and advancing organizational priorities through effective planning and innovation.
• Global engagement: cultivating strong partnerships in Canada and across borders and sectors, and communicating effectively on behalf of the organization.
• Values-driven work: advancing open access and open science through sustainable, mission-driven technologies and services.

The successful candidate will bring a proven record of managing complex projects and teams, a strong financial and operational background, and a commitment to creating inclusive work environments where people thrive.

Position Qualifications

Required

• A Master’s degree in a relevant field of specialization, such as scholarly publishing or business administration.
• Five (5) or more years’ leadership/ and management experience.
• Outstanding management skills, including:
  • Leadership, supervisory, coaching, team management, and mentorship.
  • Grant management.
  • Decision-making, strategic planning, project management, and change management.
  • Budgeting and financial administration.
• Strategic understanding and knowledge of trends in some of the following areas: higher education, academic libraries, open research infrastructure, scholarly publishing, and publishing technology
• Ability to recognize, respect, and work effectively with people with diverse perspectives and backgrounds.
• A collaborative and transparent leadership style with a demonstrated ability to build consensus.
• Ability to engage in productive relationships across and within a diverse range of institutions.
• Excellent interpersonal and intercultural communication skills, both orally and in written form.
• Willing and able to travel for business estimated at 15-20 days a year.
• Consideration may be given to an equivalent combination of education and experience.

Preferred

• Second graduate degree or certification in a relevant field of specialization related to scholarly publishing or business management.
• Experience in fund development.
• Knowledge of effective advocacy strategies with funding organizations, government bodies, and international organizations.
• Background in publishing, particularly scholarly publishing.
• Working knowledge of French, Spanish, or Portuguese.
• Experience with working with software engineers and technical teams, especially PKP software, and/or other post-secondary open source software (e.g. DSpace, Islandora, etc.).
• Able to nurture a supportive sense of belonging and fulfillment among team members working in a virtual environment.

Work Setting

Those who work and study at Simon Fraser University acknowledge the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie), and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) peoples, on whose traditional territories SFU’s three campuses stand. By recognizing the Unceded Traditional Coast Salish territories, we aspire to create a space for reconciliation through dialogue and decolonizing practices.

As an SFU Core Research Facility, PKP is fully embedded in the university community, while maintaining a global reach and distributed team. The Managing Director will be employed by Simon Fraser University and is primarily remote, with the option to be based at one of SFU’s campuses.

Recognizing PKP’s international profile and worldwide community, SFU also welcomes applications from international candidates and will provide support in securing a Canadian work permit.

Over the last twenty years, SFU has been consistently ranked as one of Canada’s top three comprehensive universities; it is repeatedly named one of British Columbia’s Top Employers, among Canada’s Top 100 employers, and a top family-friendly employer. SFU offers more than 100 undergraduate major and joint major programs and more than 45 graduate offerings, spanning many disciplines in eight faculties, and has an international reputation for its innovative interdisciplinary and professional programs.

Terms of Appointment

This is a continuing SFU staff position, with a salary range of CDN$122,570 – $158,620CAD annually, depending on experience, in addition to extended health care and other benefits.

Position begins in January 2026, but can be flexible for the right candidate.

PKP is committed to creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive working environment. We believe an open and diverse community fosters the inclusion of voices that have otherwise been underrepresented or discouraged. We seek to contribute to efforts and goals to develop and support the decolonization of scholarly publishing, to collaborate in postcolonial publishing initiatives, and to provide the means for a diversity of academic inquiry and voices to readily engage in scholarly publishing on a global scale. For more information on how PKP operates, please see our Organization page.

As part of Simon Fraser University, PKP is committed to employment equity and encourages applications from qualified candidates of all genders, visible minorities, persons of First Nations, Inuit, or Métis heritage, persons with disabilities, and LGBTQ2SIA+ identified persons.

To Apply

The link to SFU’s application system will be shared shortly, and applications will be accepted by 5:00 pm Pacific Time on Wednesday, October 29, 2025.

For more information, contact Trevor Davis, Executive Director, Research Operations at Simon Fraser University at trevor_davis@sfu.ca.

The post PKP is hiring a Managing Director appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

À l’occasion de la Journée du logiciel libre, des membres des équipes d’Érudit et du Public Knowledge Project (PKP), partenaires dans Coalition Publica, décrivent l’importance des logiciels libres dans leur travail et leur place centrale dans nos actions. Découvrez ce que signifie utiliser un logiciel libre et ce qu’en pensent les membres de nos équipes! An English version is available here.

La Journée internationale du logiciel libre aura lieu cette année le 20 septembre 2025. Mais qu’est-ce qu’un logiciel libre ? Comme l’indiquent le site web officiel de cette journée et un récent article de blogue de PKP (en anglais) :

« Utiliser un logiciel libre, c’est faire un choix politique et éthique affirmant le droit d’apprendre et de partager ce qu’on apprend avec autrui. » [notre traduction]

Concrètement, utiliser un logiciel libre signifie être libre de :

• Utiliser – l’utilisateur·trice est libre d’exécuter le programme comme il ou elle le souhaite, pour n’importe quelle raison.
• Étudier – l’utilisateur·trice est libre d’apprendre le fonctionnement du programme et de le modifier.
• Distribuer – l’utilisateur·trice est libre de distribuer des copies du logiciel pour que d’autres puissent l’utiliser.
• Modifier – l’utilisateur·trice est libre de partager ses versions modifiées.
• Accéder – l’utilisateur·trice est libre d’accéder au code source du logiciel.

Pour aller plus loin, nous avons demandé à des membres des équipes d’Érudit et de PKP de nous parler de ce que signifie la liberté logicielle et de son importance dans leur travail au sein de Coalition Publica.

Davin Baragiotta, responsable des technologies, Érudit

« Les logiciels libres sont partout chez Érudit. Systèmes d’exploitation des serveurs et postes de travail, cybersécurité, dépôts de données, moteur de recherche, applications web, outils de collaboration et de gestion de projet… Ils nous confèrent indépendance et pérennité par la collaboration possible avec les auteurs des logiciels et la transparence du code et de sa documentation. Nous en sommes de fiers utilisateurs et promoteurs pour une infrastructure nationale gérée par et pour le monde académique. »

Suzanne Beth, coordonnatrice principale, recherche, Érudit

« Les logiciels libres sont essentiels parce qu’ils incarnent concrètement la possibilité de diverger et de faire autrement : ils nous libèrent de l’enfermement imposé par la posture hégémonique des acteurs dominants, qui nous font croire qu’il n’existe qu’une manière de faire et qu’un monde possibles. »

Pedro López Casique, spécialiste du soutien aux publications, PKP

« À l’occasion de la Journée mondiale du logiciel libre, je tiens à souligner l’importance du projet GNU pour l’utilisation, l’étude, la distribution et la modification libres des logiciels. Aujourd’hui, PKP poursuit cette mission en créant des outils ouverts qui soutiennent la communication scientifique. Ces efforts réaffirment notre engagement en faveur d’un accès libre, responsable et durable à la connaissance. C’est un honneur de contribuer au mouvement mondial en faveur des logiciels libres au sein de PKP. »

Israel Cefrin, spécialiste de l’accessibilité et des systèmes numériques, PKP

« Pour moi, la liberté logicielle est indissociable de l’accessibilité. OJS, en tant qu’outil en code source libre, nous permet de rendre le savoir accessible à un plus large public, et non seulement à un petit groupe. Étant profondément attaché à l’accessibilité numérique et aux connaissances en tant que biens publiques, j’apprécie le rôle que joue PKP de démontrer comment les logiciels libres peuvent améliorer l’équité dans la recherche et la communication scientifique. »

David Cormier, architecte de systèmes d’information, Érudit

« Je considère que les logiciels libres et les valeurs qu’ils incarnent sont indispensables à une époque où de larges pans de nos vies sont médiatisés par des algorithmes opaques dont les finalités nous échappent. Je suis fier que mon travail puisse contribuer au développement d’une infrastructure de recherche ouverte, émancipatrice et au service du public. »

Jeanette Hatherill, coordonnatrice principale, Coalition Publica

« Célébrer les logiciels libres, c’est célébrer ceux et celles qui les soutiennent, et je suis fière de participer à un mouvement mondial qui prône la participation citoyenne à travers le code source libre afin que chacun·e puisse accéder au savoir et y contribuer de manière significative. Utiliser un logiciel libre, c’est faire le choix politique et éthique d’affirmer le droit d’apprendre et de partager nos apprentissages. C’est un élément essentiel de Coalition Publica et de notre travail pour faire du libre accès diamant une réalité pour les chercheur·euse·s canadien·ne·s. »

Zoe Wake Hyde, coordonnatrice d’Open Monograph Press (OMP), PKP

« Plus quelque chose est important pour le fonctionnement de nos sociétés civiles et de nos communautés, plus il est important qu’il soit gratuit et libre ! Nos vies sont en grande partie façonnées par les logiciels que nous utilisons au quotidien, et la liberté logicielle est synonyme d’une plus grande autonomie, d’un meilleur contrôle et d’une plus grande sécurité – autant de ressources rares dans le paysage technologique actuel. Les logiciels libres sont essentiels pour maintenir l’équité dans l’accès au savoir et méritent d’être célébrés. »

Urooj Nizami, directrice associée de l’engagement communautaire et de la sensibilisation, PKP

« Pour moi, la liberté logicielle signifie être autonome par rapport aux systèmes d’édition dominants et centralisés. Je suis fière de faire partie de PKP, qui œuvre à la souveraineté de sa communauté grâce à l’emploi de logiciels en code source libre. Nos outils contribuent à favoriser la bibliodiversité en créant de nouveaux paradigmes d’échange et de collaboration, rejetant du même coup les modèles fondés sur l’extraction et l’exploitation des pays du Sud. »

Alec Smecher, directeur associé du développement, PKP

« Pour moi, les logiciels libres représentent la promesse naïve de démocratiser l’information à l’origine d’Internet dans les années 90. Sans eux, Internet n’est qu’une réinvention de la télévision par câble. Il est essentiel que le mouvement du logiciel libre reste fort pour tenir cette promesse initiale. Découvrir les mouvements parallèles de la science ouverte et du libre accès avec PKP a été une révélation pour le passionné de logiciels libres et en code source ouvert que je suis. »

Si vous soutenez nos communautés ou en faites partie, partagez ces messages sur l’importance du logiciel libre ! Utilisez les mots-clics #SFD2025, #SoftwareFreedomDay2025, #FOSS et #FLOSS pour diffuser l’information.

Merci de faire partie de nos communautés et de célébrer avec nous !

The post Érudit et PKP célèbrent ensemble la Journée du logiciel libre sous le nom de Coalition Publica appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

This Software Freedom Day, Érudit and PKP get together as Coalition Publica to share why software freedom matters to us, and how it is at the heart of our efforts. Continue on to learn what it means to use free software, and for personalized messages from folks across our teams. La version française est disponible ici.

Software Freedom Day happens this year on September 20th, 2025. But what does it mean to use free software? As the Software Freedom Day website (and past PKP post) makes clear,

To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others.

In a practical sense, using free software means that the user is free to:

• Use – the user is free to run the program the way they want, for any purpose.
• Study – the user is free to learn how the program works, as well as modify it.
• Distribute – the user is free to redistribute copies for others to use.
• Modify – the user is free to share their modified versions to others.
• Access – the user is free to access the software’s source code.

To go further, and give a sense of what free software means to the people behind Érudit, PKP, and Coalition Publica, we asked folks from across our teams to speak from their hearts.

Davin Baragiotta, Chief Information Officer, Érudit

“Open source software is everywhere at Érudit. Server and workstation operating systems, cybersecurity, data repositories, search engines, web applications, collaboration and project management tools… It gives us independence and longevity through the ability to collaborate with software authors and the transparency of the code and its documentation. We are proud users and promoters of this software, building a national infrastructure managed by and for the academic world.”

Suzanne Beth, Senior Coordinator, Research, Érudit

“Free software is essential because it concretely embodies the possibility of diverging and doing things differently: it frees us from the confinement imposed by the hegemonic posture of dominant actors, who make us believe that there is only one way of doing things and one possible world.”

Pedro López Casique, Publication Support Specialist, PKP

“On Software Freedom Day, I want to recognize the importance of the GNU Project initiative for the free use, study, distribution, and modification of software. Today, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) continues that mission by creating open tools that strengthen scientific communication. These efforts reaffirm the global commitment to free, responsible, and sustainable access to knowledge. It’s an honor to contribute to PKP and the global free software movement.”

Israel Cefrin, Digital Accessibility and Systems Specialist, PKP

“To me, software freedom is inseparable from accessibility. OJS, as an Open-source tool, can provide us with the ability to make the knowledge available and accessible for a broader range of people, not just a few. As someone who cares deeply about digital accessibility and public knowledge, I value PKP’s role in showing how free software can expand equity in research and scholarly communication.”

David Cormier, Information Systems Architect, Érudit

“I believe that free software and the values ​​it embodies are essential in an era where large parts of our lives are mediated by opaque algorithms whose purposes escape us. I am proud that my work can contribute to the development of an open, emancipatory research infrastructure that serves the public.”

Jeanette Hatherill, Senior Coordinator, Coalition Publica

“To celebrate software freedom is to celebrate the people behind it, and I’m proud to be part of a global collaboration that champions open source citizenship so that everyone can access and meaningfully contribute to open knowledge. The use of free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others, and this is core to Coalition Publica and our work to make diamond open access a reality for Canadian scholars.”

Zoe Wake Hyde, Open Monograph Press (OMP) Coordinator, PKP

“The more important something is to our functioning as citizens and communities, the more important it is for it to be free (as in freedom!). So much of our lives is shaped by the software we use daily, and software freedom means greater self-determination, control and safety – all of which are in short supply in the current tech landscape. Free and open-source software (FOSS) is critically important to knowledge justice and should be celebrated.”

Urooj Nizami, Community Engagement and Outreach Associate Director, PKP

“For me, software freedom is about having autonomy from dominant, centralized publishing systems. I’m proud to be part of PKP because it shows what distributed sovereignty can look like through free and open-source software. Our tools help foster an ecosystem of bibliodiversity that rejects extractive models that exploit the Global South, instead creating new paradigms of exchange and collaboration.”

Alec Smecher, Development Associate Director, PKP

“To me, Free Software is the engine driving the Internet’s naive promise back in the ’90s to democratize information. Without it, the Internet is just cable TV reinvented, and the Free Software movement needs to stay strong to deliver on that original promise. Discovering the parallel Open Science and Open Access movements with PKP has been a revelation for this lifelong FOSS nerd. We are the same.”

If you support, or are part of, our communities, please share these messages on the importance of free software! Using the hashtags #SFD2025, #SoftwareFreedomDay2025, #FOSS and #FLOSS will help spread the word.

Thank you for being part of our communities and celebrating with us!

The post Érudit and PKP Celebrate Software Freedom Day Together as Coalition Publica appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

The “Publishing Cultures in Transition: Open Access, Critical Digital Literacy, and Digital Infrastructures” call for papers is open until November 14th, 2025. This special issue will be edited by Klaus Rummler, Natalie Marty, and PKP’s Urooj Nizami. The original, full call for papers was published at medienpaed.com.

Theme

In recent years, scholar-led Open Access (OA) journals have emerged as powerful catalysts for reimagining the practices and politics of academic publishing. These journals, especially those who are following the Diamond Open Access model and are grounded in the principle that neither readers nor authors bear publication costs, are more than alternative distribution channels – they are the outcome of critical engagement with exclusionary and commercialized models of scholarly communication.

The Example of Open Journal Systems (OJS by PKP)

The following is entirely quoted from the Medien Pädagogik Call for Papers.

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is best known for developing Open Journal Systems (OJS) – the world’s most widely used journal management and publishing platform. OJS supports over 55.000 active journals in 161 countries, operating in 60 languages – well over half of all scientific journals, issues and papers, worldwide. Between 2020 and 2024 alone, nearly 9 million articles have been published using OJS. These numbers not only reflect broad adoption but also affirm OJS’s role in supporting bibliodiversity, multilingualism, and the global dissemination of research, especially from and about the Global South.

OJS and the broader PKP ecosystem have been described as an archipelago (Nizami 2024): a distributed yet interconnected constellation of journals, institutions, and communities. Each of those publishing initiatives represents a distinct island – locally grounded, self-governed, and responsive to their context – while sharing common infrastructures, values, and dedicated to a commitment to Open Access as a Global Public Good, affirming both sovereignty and solidarity, thus enabling local relevance alongside global collaboration.

Édouard Glissant, the Martinican writer and philosopher, writes powerfully of «archipelagic thinking» (la pensée archipélagique) as a means of using situated practices to connect distinctive contexts. Quoting Glissant from Caribbean Discourse, the scholar An Yountae writes,

For Glissant, the archipelagic imagination views each island [as] embod[ying] openness. The dialectic between inside and outside is reflected in the relationship of land and sea. He abolishes the very notion of the universal and the particular, or centre and periphery. (Yountae 2024, 149; quoting Glissant 1989, 139).

While OJS has witnessed widespread global adoption, scholarly engagement with the socio-cultural dimensions of the sea-change toward open platforms in scholarly publishing has yet to be critically explored. Rather than viewing islands as isolated, exotic, or insular, we draw on archipelagic thinking to advocate for a relational approach that integrates localized currents and global horizons. PKP’s mission and vision reflects archipelagic thinking in two key ways: (1) OJS fosters autonomy from dominant, centralized publishing systems, offering a model of distributed sovereignty through free and open source software; and (2) these tools support an ecosystem of bibliodiversity, rejecting a model of extraction from the Global South and setting a new paradigm of exchange and collaboration.

Invitation

We invite contributions that critically examine and celebrate the cultures and practices of scholar-led (Diamond) Open Access publishing as sites of digital literacy, democratization, and knowledge politics. We are particularly interested in works that address the following interrelated themes:

• Critical Engagement with Scholarly Publishing Norms
• Democratization and Equity in Knowledge Production
• Governance, Infrastructures, and Critical (Digital) Literacy
• The Politics and Sustainability of Open Scholarship
• Infrastructures and Ecologies of Scholar-Led Publishing: OJS & PKP in Practice

Details

The Call for Papers is open until November 14th, 2025. For details about the themes, contributions, submission, procedure requirements, quality assurance strategy, publication format, author guidelines, editors, and references, please visit the full announcement.

The post Publishing Cultures in Transition: Medien Pädagogik Call for Papers appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.