Public Knowledge Project

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP ) is a research and software development initiative, which is supported by four partners: the educational science faculties of the University of British Columbia and Stanford University as well as the library and the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University.

History

The PKP was founded in 1998 by John Willinsky, which works to intensively for open access to the education faculty of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. 2001, the first software was completed. Under the technical direction of Kevin Jamieson Polish State Railways, developed from now on Open Journal Systems, Open Conference Systems and Open Harvester Systems under the GNU General Public License. 2005 began working with Lynn Copeland, a librarian of the Simon Fraser University Library in Burnaby, Canada, and Rowly Lorimer, Director of the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at the same university. 2007 hosted the PKP first conference, which was held for the third time in 2011. In 2007, Willinsky accepted an appointment at the Stanford University, USA, with which the circle of the institutional partners of the PKP has been extended.

Objectives

The PKP aims to improve the quality and accessibility of research results. Researchers are students of the different departments involved as well as librarians, whether and how new technologies can be used to do so. The development of appropriate software is based on the consideration of technical as well as social and economic aspects.

Software Development

The PKP has released four independent, content linked open source applications that are constantly evolving:

Open Journal Systems ( OJS ) is a management system for academic journals. It allows the organization of online submissions by authors of the peer review process and the subscriptions of one or more magazines.

Open Conference Systems (OCS ) is an application for creating a conference web site, the tasks of the conference organization can be handled by the by the call for papers to publish a conference proceedings.

Open Harvester Systems is a software to create a searchable index of the metadata to digital content, use the default of the Open Archives Initiative ( OAI).

Lemon8 XML converts word processing formats into the XML format. The web-based application also provides metadata editing and Zitationswerkzeuge.

In addition, is currently Open Monograph Press ( OMP) in development: OMP is similar to OJS for journals that support the publication of scientific monographs and could for example be used in publishing.