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PKP POSI Self-Assessment

The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) offer a set of guidelines by which open scholarly infrastructure organisations and initiatives can assess their openness, track the progress, and make new advances.

The following is PKP’s POSI self assessment:

Legend: ✓= Achieved ⭘ = In progress/under consideration ⮿= No progress/Unobtainable

Governance
Coverage across the research enterprise – research transcends disciplines, geography, institutions, and stakeholders. Organisations and the infrastructure they run need to reflect this.
✓ PKP’s infrastructure is used to manage the editorial and publication process for a variety of scholarly outputs.
✓ It has been used in all disciplines, in many countries, and in multiple languages. More information is available from our usage statistics.
⭘ Future developments will expand into authorship tools and XML outputs, broadening its use across the research enterprise.
Stakeholder Governed – a board-governed organisation drawn from the stakeholder community builds confidence that the organisation will take decisions driven by community consensus and a balance of interests.
✓ PKP is a research facility of Simon Fraser University, a Canadian public university, and is ultimately governed by that institution and its Board of Governors.
✓ An MOU between PKP and SFU is in place to ensure PKP’s unique mission and role in the international community is understood and respected by SFU.
✓ PKP does have an SFU Community Advisory Committee, an international Advisory Committee, an international Technical Committee, and an international Members Committee which provide oversight and input for PKP activities. See the Governance page for details.
Non-discriminatory participation or membership – we see the best option as an “opt-in” approach with principles of non-discrimination and inclusivity where any stakeholder group may express an interest and should be welcome. Representation in day-to-day governance must reflect the character of the community or membership.
✓ All PKP software is free and open source and can be downloaded, modified, and used without registration, under the terms of the GPL.
✓ Free community support, including documentation, courses, forum assistance, are provided without discrimination to anyone using our products, who agree to our Code of Conduct.
✓ Membership on the PKP Advisory Committee, Members Committee, and Technical Committee is open to any organization that meets its basic criteria.
✓ Membership on interest groups (e.g., Documentation Interest Group) is open to anyone that meets its basic criteria.
✓ Participation in PKP sprints is open.
✓ Participation in UI/UX feedback opportunities is open.
Transparent governance– to achieve trust, the processes and policies for selecting representatives to governance groups should be transparent (within the constraints of privacy laws).
✓ PKP produces an Annual Report of its activities at its Annual General Meeting.
✓ Participation in the AGM is open to everyone.
✓ Minutes of the Advisory, Members. and Technical Committees are available on the PKP website.
✓ Technical decision-making is done in public, in GitHub issues and discussions, often canvassing affected stakeholders.
Cannot lobby – infrastructure organisations should not lobby for regulatory change to cement their own positions or narrow self-interest. However, an infrastructure organisation’s role is to support its community, and this can include advocating for policy changes.
✓ PKP does not engage in self-interested lobbying.
✓ As a research, development, and advocacy initiative, PKP does participate in addressing, submitting briefs and research to, and generally lobbying influential organizations, including legislative bodies, and individuals to advance the principles of open access and bibliodiversity.
Living will – a powerful way to create trust is to publicly describe a plan addressing the conditions under which an organisation or service would be wound down. It should include how this would happen and how any assets could be archived and preserved when passed to a successor organisation or service. Any such organisation or service must adopt POSI and honour the POSI principles.
✓ PKP’s primary applications (OPS, OJS, and OMP) are distributed, open source software, intended for self-hosting and with repositories archived safely in multiple places through Github, git, and associated tools. The software’s user community can continue without impediment to use and develop the software should PKP cease operating
✓ Any existing applications that PKP decides to no longer develop or support (e.g., Open Conference Systems, Open Harvester Systems) remain freely available for others to download, use, adapt, and develop.
✓ The PKP Preservation Network, a service operated by PKP, is also open source, and makes use of the LOCKSS toolset in a multi-organization deployment to ensure archived content is not dependent on PKP’s continued existence.
⭘ PKP will investigate procedures for formalizing a living will
Formal incentives to fulfill mission & wind-down – infrastructures exist for a specific purpose, and that purpose can be radically simplified or even rendered unnecessary by technological or social change. Organisations and services should regularly review community support and the need for their activities. If it is possible, the organisation or service (and staff) should have direct incentives to deliver on the mission and wind down.
✓ As a university research facility, broad procedures are in place for winding down our activities.
✓ The use of GPL and Creative Commons licenses and Github repositories to ensure ongoing access to our work.
✓ PKP maintains a financial reserve to fund any winding down activities.
✓ PKP carefully tracks its international software usage and community engagement, and would have early signals of a significant change in the environment that would indicate the need to wind-down.

Sustainability
Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities – operations are supported by sustainable revenue sources – whereas time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities. Depending on grants to fund ongoing and/or long-term infrastructure operations fully makes them fragile and distracts them from building core infrastructure.
✓ PKP has developed a four-tiered sustainability approach which includes home institution support, grants, financial memberships, and revenue generating business activities.
✓ This approach provides long-term financial support for operational activities, and time-limited funding (i.e., grants) for time-limited activities (e.g., innovations).
✓ We are recipients of a unique Canadian federal grant (Canadian Foundation for Innovation – Major Science Initiatives) which is for renewable 6-year terms and is explicitly for operations. Although time-delimited, the time line is large enough to justify operational expenses.
Goal to generate surplus – organisations (or services) that define sustainability based merely on recovering costs are brittle and stagnant. It is not enough to merely survive; organisations and services have to be able to adapt and change. To weather economic, social and technological volatility, they need financial resources beyond immediate operating costs.
✓ PKP has operated with an expanding budget since 2012, which has consistently included a surplus, enabling the maintenance of a reserve.
Goal to create financial reserves – a high priority should be having ring-fenced financial reserves, separate from operating funds, that can support implementing living will plans, including a complete, orderly wind down or transition to a successor organisation, or major unexpected events.
✓ PKP’s reserve would support reduced but fundamental activities for at least a 12-month period.
⭘ PKP will include the amount of its reserve fund in future financial reports.
Mission-consistent revenue generation – – revenue sources should be evaluated against the infrastructure’s mission and not run counter to the aims of the organisation or service.
✓ All PKP revenue generation is consistent with our mission (see above).
Revenue based on services, not data – – data related to the running of the research enterprise should be community property. Appropriate revenue sources might include value-added services, consulting, API Service Level Agreements or membership fees.
✓ PKP does not generate revenue from data (see above).

Insurance
Open source – All software and assets required to run the infrastructure should be available under an open-source licence. This does not include other software that may be involved with running the organisation.
✓ All PKP software is licensed under the GPL.
✓ All PKP documentation is licensed under CC
✓ Details are available on the PKP website.
Open data (within constraints of privacy laws) – For an infrastructure to be forked (reproduced), it will be necessary to replicate all relevant data. The CC0 waiver is the best practice in making data openly and legally available. Privacy and data protection laws will limit the extent to which this is possible.
✓ PKP does not generate data for itself from our applications.
✓ PKP maintains a beacon capable of collecting data from participating journals, which it is making available at Dataverse on an annual basis under a CC0 license.
✓ Users of PKP applications collect data from their registered users (e.g., metadata, text documents, etc.) which may ultimately be made openly available. However, PKP software is licensed as free software under the GNU General Public License, and as such, cannot mandate open data publication by its users.
Available data (within constraints of privacy laws) – It is not enough that the data be “open” if there is no practical way to obtain it. Underlying data should be made easily available via periodic open data dumps.
✓ PKP does not generate data for itself from our applications.
✓ PKP application service providers are able to easily export all data from the system as they require.
✓ PKP software is licensed as free software under the GNU General Public License, and as such, cannot mandate open data availability by its users.
Patent non-assertion – The organisation should commit to a patent non-assertion policy or covenant. The organisation may obtain patents to protect its own operations but not use them to prevent the community from replicating the infrastructure.
✓ PKP has not sought to assert any patents for its applications and has no plans to do so.
✓ All PKP applications are released under GPL 3.0, which, in Section 11, references patent non-assertion.