This October 20 – 26 is International Open Access Week 2025, organized by SPARC in partnership with the Open Access Week Advisory Committee. PKP takes the time to answer the theme question, “Who Owns Our Knowledge?” and invites communities to join in.

This year’s theme asks a pointed question about the present moment and how, in a time of disruption, communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce (OA Week homepage).

PKP Considers the Question of how Communities can Reassert Control over their Knowledge Production

In a time of growing concern about sovereignty and control of scholarly infrastructure — especially in politically unstable contexts — the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) offers a different path. We provide a distributed, quality open-source alternative that keeps ownership and control in the hands of the academic community.

We embrace the archipelago: a network of autonomous yet connected communities, united by shared values and a commitment to knowledge as a global public good.

At PKP, we believe scholars and communities should control how their knowledge is created, shared, and preserved. That’s why we develop free, open-source software — like Open Journal Systems (OJS)— that empowers thousands of journals worldwide to publish independently and openly.

This Open Access Week, we’re celebrating the people who make this possible: our global community of contributors. Together, we’re reclaiming scholarly publishing for the public good — through open tools, shared expertise, and collective action.

How Community Contributions Shape the Future of PKP

As a free and open-source (FOSS) initiative, PKP thrives through the collaboration and commitment of a diverse global community. Every contribution — whether technical, linguistic, educational, or financial — strengthens our shared infrastructure for open publishing.

This week, we’re highlighting a few of the ways our community sustains and expands this collective effort. From writing code and documentation to translating resources and funding development, your involvement helps ensure that open publishing remains open to all.

We invite you to join us in supporting community-led publishing for the public good.

Your participation — of any kind — helps keep knowledge creation and sharing in the hands of those who produce it.

Code Contributions: Expanding What’s Possible

Community developers around the world enhance our software — Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Monograph Press (OMP), and Open Preprint Systems (OPS) — by introducing new features, improving interoperability, and extending functionality through plugins.

This OA Week, we’re spotlighting recent work from the CRAFT-OA (Creating a Robust and Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access) project, whose OJS Diamond OA Plugins expand support for diamond open access workflows. These contributions demonstrate what’s possible when open infrastructure meets open collaboration.

…many high-quality Diamond journals remain underrecognised [sic] within the global research community… The objective of the OJS Diamond Plugins is twofold: to increase the visibility of Diamond OA journals and to simplify editorial workflows, enabling editors to focus on content curation rather than administrative burden. The five plugins developed under CRAFT-OA are designed to work together to address these goals in a modular and reusable way.

— Martina Dvořáková and Radek Gomola, Masaryk University Press, Czechia (from their Pubmet 2025 extended abstract for their presentation on “Plugging into quality: Boosting Diamond OA Journals with OJS Plugins“)

Check out the CRAFT-OA OJS Diamond Plugins

Documentation: Building Collective Knowledge

Not only is PKP software free and open source, underpinning open access, but we make our resources freely available so that PKP infrastructure users are empowered to use the software. One such example is PKP’s Documentation Hub, which offers user guides, developer documentation, and publishing resources for all our software. Thanks to countless community contributions, PKP Docs Hub remains current, practical, and comprehensive.

The systems that PKP produces and supports are essential for disintermediating scholarly publishing while still maintaining the high standards that accompany the ideal of peer review. Participating in the PKP Documentation Interest Group is my way of contributing to that important mission, and I’m happy to do what I can to support the global community.

— Amanda French, Research Organization Registry (ROR), Crossref

Recently, we launched the Learning Resources Interest Group to collaboratively develop the next generation of PKP learning materials — beyond written documentation. Together, we’re creating videos, quick guides, infographics, and slide decks that meet users where they are.

Stay tuned for opportunities to join a Working Group and help shape these new learning tools!

Translations: Supporting a Truly Global Community

As a global open-source project, PKP is committed to making our software and learning materials accessible in multiple languages. Our multilingual community plays a vital role — translating new software releases, documentation, and training materials so that open publishing is truly global.

In just one example, thanks in large apart to translation contributors, OJS is currently used by over 55,000 journals in over 150 countries, with journals publishing almost 9 million articles in more than 60 languages (based on 2024 stats).

Every translation is a seed of knowledge autonomy. When communities adapt our software into their own languages, they take ownership of a piece of the project. Under the stewardship of motivated scholars, a software translation can grow into new networks of open publishing that is owned, sustained, and defined by contributors and their collaborators in the regions they serve.

— Emma Uhl, PKP Documentation and Multilingualism Specialist

Learn more and get involved in PKP translations

Financial contributions sustain and grow essential work towards equitable future for scholarly publishing

Open infrastructure depends on open participation — and that includes financial and in-kind support from our communities.

PKP’s sustainability model combines Simon Fraser University’s administrative support, PKP Publishing Services revenue, and distributed contributions from global partners and financial contributors who share our mission. These include:

• Development Partners: Institutions that provide significant financial contributions and in-kind support that help set priorities for new features in PKP software through direct involvement in our governance structure.
• Financial Contributors: Libraries and organizations that fund open access initiatives and open infrastructure.
• Research Funders: Agencies and partners supporting PKP’s research and educational projects to advance equitable scholarly communication.

To learn more about PKP’s finances and partnerships, visit our Annual Reports.

Learn how your organization can support PKP

Join us to give back, care for the community, and stay engaged

Open infrastructure isn’t something we own — it’s something we care for together. As the landscape of scholarly communication continues to evolve, PKP remains committed to a future where knowledge creation and sharing are governed by the academic community itself.

At PKP, we believe that knowledge can only be a public good if everyone can participate. We extend scholarly publishing by creating spaces that are welcoming for all and that honour people’s right to know through diverse forms of research and scholarship.

This Open Access Week, we invite you to join us in that work.

Contribute your skills, your knowledge, or your support — and help build a publishing ecosystem where open truly means open for everyone.

Multiple ways to get involved

Please consider sharing these messages with your networks, tell your stories, and support the OA Week theme “Who owns our knowledge”. Use the hashtag #OAWeek and tag PKP!

PKP on social media

Don’t forget to sign up to PKP’s Community Newsletter, Archipelago, to get the latest news!

Sign up for Archipelago

The post Who Owns Our Knowledge? How Communities Power the Future of Open Publishing with PKP appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

Is it time for you to update your Open Journal Systems (OJS) installation? What else can you do to keep your installation secure and take part in the shared responsibility? What resources are available to you? Continue on to get answers to these questions.

Is it time to upgrade?

No matter what version of OJS you are using, updates may be available for you. It’s important to keep up with updates — they aren’t difficult to implement, and they fix bugs as well as keep everything running smoothly and securely.

• If you’re on OJS 3.3 LTS, you should update to the latest release (currently 3.3.0-21 as of October 2025; stay tuned for 3.5 LTS announcement)
• If you’re on OJS 3.4, you should update to the latest release (currently 3.4.0-9 as of October 2025)
• If you’re on 3.5, you should update to the latest release (currently 3.5.0-1 as of October 2025)

Check out what’s new in each version, access the release notebooks, and download updates on PKP’s OJS Download page.

What else can you do to stay secure?

• Use a strong password: it’s a simple habit that makes a big difference for your security.
• Stick with a unique username: make sure your account details are distinct. Avoid generic usernames like “admin”.

Additional Resources

• Admin guide for installing OJS
• PKP Docs upgrading guide
• How to upgrade from 3.3.0 to 3.5.0 video (stay tuned for branch-specific upgrading videos)
• PKP Community Forum Software Support category
• Subscribe to PKP Security Announcements

Share the responsibility

Maintaining decentralized, free and open source software is a community responsibility and we must all pitch in. Free and open source software thrives on shared responsibility.

We’re doing our part by monitoring and releasing new point updates and you can do yours by implementing those updates when they’re available. Help keep PKP FOSS safe and secure!

The post Memo: Keeping your OJS Installation Secure appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

Join us October 28, 2025, 8 AM PDT, to learn about new features and enhancements coming with the OJS 3.6 release in 2026.

Launching in 2026, OJS / OMP / OPS version 3.6 introduces several long-anticipated improvements to support more flexible and efficient publishing practices. This webinar is the first in a series highlighting the new features and enhancements coming with this release.

Topics

In this session, we’ll focus on two key developments: continuous publication and article versioning.

• Continuous publication enables editors to publish articles as soon as they are ready, without waiting for an entire issue to be complete.
• Enhanced article versioning allows journals to make preprints or “author originals” available ahead of peer review, while providing a clear distinction between early versions and the final version of record.

Participants will see how these features work in 3.6, learn how to configure them for their journals, and have the opportunity to engage directly with PKP developers to ask questions and discuss future directions.

Whether you’re an editor, journal manager, or part of a publishing team, this session will provide practical insight into how OJS 3.6 can help streamline workflows and expand publishing options.

Webinar details

Tuesday, October 28, 2025, 8 – 9 AM PDT (convert the time zone). Online, free.

This webinar will be recorded and shared with the public. If you can’t make it, register anyway and get the recording!

The hosts will disable microphones and video screens, and there will be opportunities for questions and comments. AI bots are not permitted and will be removed from the meeting.

Use of Eventbrite to register is voluntary. Eventbrite data is stored on U.S. servers. If you prefer not to use Eventbrite to register for this event, please register by emailing commpkp[at]sfu.ca – subject line: 3.6 webinar registration.

Zoom’s privacy statement

Thank you for considering joining the webinar. If you prefer to send questions or comments to PKP after the event in an alternative format, please contact PKP.

The post Coming in OJS 3.6: Continuous publication and journal article versions appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

Registration is now open for the Open Publishing Series — three online courses from SFU’s MPub program, with start dates in January and May, 2026. Join us for a webinar on October 30 to meet the instructors and learn more.

In an era of disinformation, polarization, and growing mistrust of academic institutions, scholarly publishing is more important now than ever. Last month we shared a Sneak Peek at the Open Publishing Series, a collection of three online courses developed in collaboration with the Master of Publishing (MPub) program at Simon Fraser University (SFU) as part of SFU’s new scholarly communications stream  – designed to help students and practitioners navigate this rapidly changing landscape with confidence.

We’re excited to announce that registration is now open to learners from around the world through SFU LifeLong Learning! Keep reading for information about what you’ll learn and how to register.

Open Publishing Courses: Register Now

Whether you’re interested in enhancing your skills and knowledge in journal management and editing, exploring technologies and infrastructures for scholarly publishing, or investigating the principles of knowledge as a global public good, the Open Publishing series has you covered.

Taught by expert instructors from SFU, these courses will be of particular interest to scholarly publishing professionals, including current and aspiring librarians, journal managers, and journal editors.

Register for courses

Registration is open for continuing education (non-credit) students through SFU LifeLong Learning. 

• PUB 604: Technologies and Infrastructure for Academic Publishing (starts January 2026): Register here (course details).
• PUB 611: Making Knowledge Public (starts January 2026): Register here (course details).
• PUB 603: Journal Management and Editing (starts May 2026): Register here (course details).

Apply for a course discount

We are committed to keeping these courses accessible. Discounts and fee waivers are available for a limited number of participants with financial constraints, especially those without institutional support or from underrepresented regions. 

Please contact commpkp@sfu.ca with the nature of your need, including your role, institutional affiliation, and country of residence. Requests will be reviewed confidentially and fairly, with priority given to those who would otherwise be unable to participate.

Meet the instructors and discover what you’ll learn

Technologies and Infrastructure for Academic Publishing (PUB 604)

Course dates: January – April, 2026 | Course details | Register here | Cost approx. $670 USD ($930 CAD)

What technologies and infrastructures support the publishing, discovery, preservation, and linking of scholarship? What tools and services create the “scholarly record”?

This course equips students with the expertise to navigate the growing landscape of academic publishing technologies — covering systems, standards, techniques, and platforms for sustainable academic publishing.

Alison Moore is a Digital Scholarship Librarian at Simon Fraser University Library. Since joining SFU Library in 2015, Ali has focused on supporting student and faculty researchers with scholarly communications, research impact, and online presence.

Ali has held a number of roles at SFU Library, most recently as the Acting Head, Learning & Engagement, the Digital Scholarship Librarian in the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab, and Manager, Knowledge Mobilization. Ali has an MLIS from McGill University and a BA from UBC in Political Science and English Literature. Prior to joining SFU Library, Ali worked at the Vancouver Public Library, Concordia Libraries, and the Vancouver Pacific Swim Club.

Making Knowledge Public (PUB 611)

Course dates: January – April, 2026 | Course details | Register here | Cost approx. $670 USD ($930 CAD)

How does research shape public policy? How is the public involved in science? And how is knowledge that is produced at universities taken up by society?

This course examines the changing role of research, knowledge-making, and truth in the public sphere — exploring the public value of scholarship, the pressures that diminish this mission, and the need for universities and researchers to engage more purposefully with society.

Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin is an Associate Professor in Publishing, Co-Director of the ScholCommLab, and Scientific Director of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) at Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Dr. Alperin is an established researcher of scholarly communications, known for bringing evidence-based perspectives to pragmatic solutions in support of open access and open science. He has published dozens of peer-reviewed publications and delivered countless presentations on related topics and serves on the boards and steering committees of various organizations, including the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) and OpenAlex. His work focuses on making scholarly communication more equitable, inclusive, and publicly engaged, particularly across Latin America and the Global South.

Journal Management and Editing (PUB 603)

Course dates: May – August, 2026 | Course details | Register here | Cost approx. $670 USD ($930 CAD)

This course equips students with the knowledge and skills to navigate the growing landscape of academic journal publishing — covering content curation, peer review, editorial strategies, copyright, publication ethics, and the practical workflows needed to operate a journal, with an emphasis on open access.

Jennifer Zerkee is a Copyright Specialist in the Simon Fraser University Copyright Office, based in the SFU Library. She joined SFU Library in 2011 and has been the Copyright Specialist since 2013. 

Jennifer develops and delivers copyright education and information to instructors, researchers, students, and staff. She helps academic authors understand their rights when publishing, and provides assistance with understanding and applying Creative Commons licences to open access publications and open educational materials. Her areas of research include copyright advocacy, legislation reform, and copyright administration in post-secondary institutions. Jennifer holds a Certificate in Law from Queen’s University and a Creative Commons Certificate for Librarians, in addition to an MAS from the University of British Columbia and a BA from SFU.

Want to learn more? Attend an upcoming webinar with the course instructors

Join us for a 90-minute webinar with all three course instructors for a behind-the-scenes look at what you’ll learn in each course. Get an overview of key concepts, hear course highlights, and bring your questions for the instructors. 

Time and date: Thursday, October 30th, 2025, 9 – 10:30 AM PDT

Venue: Free, online via Zoom

Stay informed!

Sign up to stay informed about program updates and be notified about future course offerings in the Open Publishing Series.

The post Register Now for PKP + SFU Open Publishing Courses! appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.

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 Publishing 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.

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