The post Where’s the Data? Finding It, Moving It, and Loving It through PKP Interoperability appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.
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February 9 – 13 2026 is International Love Data Week, but PKP celebrates data sharing all year round. Considering the theme “Where’s the Data” in this post, the answer at PKP is clear — the data is everywhere and interoperability is how we help it flow.
International Love Data Week is a moment to celebrate not just data itself, but the systems, people, and partnerships that make data visible, usable, and meaningful. This year’s theme — Where’s the data? — asks an important question for open scholarly publishing. At PKP, the answer is clear: the data is everywhere, and interoperability is how we help it flow.
Data doesn’t live in one place and that’s a good thing
In scholarly publishing, data is rarely static or siloed. It lives in submission systems, editorial workflows, indexing services, preservation networks, metrics platforms, repositories, and discovery tools. For journals and presses using PKP software, the challenge isn’t whether data exists — it’s how to connect it across systems in ways that are sustainable, transparent, and community-governed.
That’s where PKP’s approach to interoperability comes in.
Rather than building a closed ecosystem, PKP software is designed to work with a wide range of partners across the scholarly communications landscape. The PKP Plugin Gallery is a concrete expression of that philosophy: a growing collection of integrations that help answer the question “Where’s the data?” at every stage of the publishing lifecycle.
Interoperability as stewardship for data
Plugins and core feature enhancements aren’t just technical add-ons. They’re acts of stewardship for data, ensuring it can be:
- Discovered, with metadata exchange and discovery platforms like Érudit, Crossref, DataCite, and DOAJ
- Identified, for example, interoperability for DOIs, ORCID iDs, ROR, and CRediT
- Preserved, through long-term archiving and preservation like the PKP Preservation Network, LOCKSS, and CLOCKSS
- Measured, for example with statistics features and Beacon Data
- Shared, across platforms, borders, and communities via free and open source software
These are only some of the ways that the PKP software suite is interoperable, sharing data with other infrastructures. More examples include plugins like COinS for grabbing citations, COUNTER Reports for generating journal activity data, Dataverse for allowing authors to submit associated research data with manuscripts, Funding for adding submission funding data using the Crossref funders registry, Publication Facts Label for putting spread out journal information in one place, OpenAIRE for improved data sharing, and much more.
From metadata deposits to preservation workflows, PKP plugins help data move where it needs to go, without requiring reinvention of infrastructure.
Partnerships make data travel
Many of the tools in the PKP Plugin Gallery exist because of partnerships with organizations that share PKP’s commitment to open, community-led infrastructure. These integrations reflect a collective understanding that no single system can or should do everything.
Each plugin represents a bridge between editorial work and discovery, between local publishing contexts and global research networks, between today’s publishing needs and tomorrow’s preservation requirements. Together, they help ensure that data generated through PKP-powered journals doesn’t disappear into the void, but instead remains findable and reusable.
For example, in an Archipelago interview, PKP’s Scientific Director Juan Pablo Alperin had this to say about the importance of mobilizing metadata, how collecting and analyzing the data contributes to research, and ultimately impacts the scholarly record.
The ability to aggregate and analyze metadata across the wide diversity of OJS journals now gives us, for the first time, a global evidence base. This bibliometric research not only helps us understand the real conditions of diamond OA publishing but also informs PKP’s development priorities, standards work, and community guidance, ultimately supporting the fuller inclusion of these journals in the scholarly record. — Juan Pablo Alperin
Asking “Where’s the data?” and answering it together
Love Data Week invites us to ask hard questions about data: who controls it, who can access it, and who benefits from it. In scholarly publishing, those questions are inseparable from infrastructure choices.
By supporting interoperability through open plugins and partner integrations, PKP helps journals, presses, and preprint servers retain agency over their data while still participating fully in the broader scholarly ecosystem. The data stays with the community but it doesn’t stay stuck.
Loving data means supporting the systems behind it
This Love Data Week, we’re celebrating not only data itself, but the often-invisible work that allows it to circulate: open standards, shared governance, thoughtful partnerships, and interoperable tools.
So, where’s the data?
In PKP software, it’s in the connections: moving between systems, enriched by partners, preserved for the future, and always rooted in the communities that create it.
Happy Love Data Week 
International Love Data Week is organized by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), an international consortium of 800+ academic and research bodies.
Use the hashtag #LoveData26 to share this post and your love for data sharing!
The post Where’s the Data? Finding It, Moving It, and Loving It through PKP Interoperability appeared first on Public Knowledge Project.
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Have you seen our video tutorials highlighting the changes you can expect in OJS 3.5? 