Research

With the global distribution of open access publishing resulting in increasing public availability of research, this project seeks to advance the public’s and the professions’ ability to assess the trustworthiness of the research in its compliance with scholar publishing standards.

In its commitment to open science, PKP is making available the data it collects annually, with the publishing platform operator’s consent, from the publishing software beacon, which includes publishing and indexing information from OJS, OMP, and OPS installations. Data is made available under a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication.

This data has been used to plot the usage of OJS:

• Global presence map and active journals by country and region here (2022).


• Animated map showing growth by country here (1991-2021).


• Map of OJS Version 2 and OJS Version 3 usage here (2020).


• Figures representing usage by time, country, number of articles here (2020).

The 2024 analysis of the total active journals using OJS in 2022 revealed 44,776 active journals. A journal is defined as ‘active’ if it has 5 or more records / articles published in a calendar year. The analysis also showed the total articles published in active OJS journals from 2020-2022 was 4,442,921.

Based on 2020 beacon data from instances of OJS, the 2020 study identifies the countries (156), languages (60), and disciplines (roughly all) of some 25K journals using the software, along with their very different indexing levels in major scholarly indexes and low presence on predatory journal lists.

Metadata ensures accurate identification and citation of a work. It can improve discoverability, access, dissemination, preservation, and, arguably, research impact. It can help disambiguate similar works. The work outlined in this proposal will serve to “prove” that metadata quality, consistency and completeness impact individuals and communities.

The COVID-19 pandemic served to challenge the way we carry out, communicate, and engage with science. To better understand the long-term impacts of this shift for a more resilient and informed society, this transnational team will assess interplay between researchers, policymakers, science communicators, and the public.

Sharing Health Research examines the on-going transformations in the online media landscape, with a focus on how they contribute to the wider communication and uptake of health research. It examines how health information circulates online, and provides insight into the sharing of reliable health information.

Willinsky argues in his new (open access) book that copyright is not doing as much as it could to help move scholarly publishing to open access. The book proposes a legal remedy for promoting sustainable, immediate, and universal open access for research publications known as statutory licensing to ensure that publishers are fairly compensated for providing immediate open access by the institutional users and funders of these publications.