The PKP was founded in 1998 by
John Willinsky in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, in
Vancouver,
British Columbia,
Canada, based on his research in education and publishing. The PKP's initial focus was on increasing access to scholarly research and output beyond the traditional academic environments. This soon led to a related interest in scholarly communication and publishing, and especially on ways to make it more cost effective and less reliant on commercial enterprises and their generally restricted access models. PKP has developed free, open source software for the management, publishing, and indexing of journals, conferences, and monographs. The PKP has collaborated with a wide range of partners interested in making research publicly available, including the
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Brazilian Institute for Information Science and Technology (IBICT), and the
International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP). Together with INASP, the PKP is working with publishers, librarians, and academics in the development of
scholarly research portals in the developing world, including
African Journals OnLine (AJOL) and Asia Journals Online. As of 2008, the PKP has joined the Synergies Canada initiative, contributing their technical expertise to integrating work being done within a five-party consortium to create a decentralized national platform for social sciences and humanities research communication in Canada.
Growth 2005 to 2009 The Public Knowledge Project grew between 2005 and 2009. In 2006, there were approximately 400 journals using
Open Journal Systems (OJS), 50 conferences using
Open Conference Systems (OCS), 4 organizations using the Harvester, and 350 members registered on the online support forum. In 2009, over 5000 journals were using OJS, more than 500 conferences were using OCS, at least 10 organizations are using the Harvester, and there were over 2400 members on the support forum. Since 2005, there were major releases (version 2) of three software modules (OJS, OCS, Harvester), as well as the addition of Lemon8-XML, with a growing number of downloads being recorded every month for all of the software. From June 12, 2009 to December 21, 2009, there were 28451 downloads of OJS, 6329 of OCS, 1255 of the Harvester, and 1096 of Lemon8-XML. A new module,
Open Monograph Press (a publication management system for monographs) has also been released. The PKP also witnessed increased community programming contributions, including new plugins and features, such as the subscription module, allowing OJS to support full open access, delayed open access, or full subscription-only access. A growing number of translations have been contributed by community members, with Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese versions of OJS completed, and several others in production.
Growth from 2010 A German platform, based on OJS, is being developed by the Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS),
Free University of Berlin and two other institutions. Funding by the
German Research Foundation (DFG) initially runs from 2014 to 2016.
Growth from 2021 According to statistics collected from the PKP Beacon project, which was presented at the Open Publishing Fest with the title "Location of known journals using PKP’s Open Journal Systems", OJS is currently being used by at least 54,000 journals across the world. A daily updated map is available at the PKP site. PKP also released the source dataset (updated yearly) as a dataset in
Dataverse and the Beacon source code. ==PKP conferences==