The key to the Public Knowledge Project’s success over the last two decades has been its commitment to writing, maintaining, and releasing free and open source software (FOSS) publishing platforms and workflows – namely Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Monograph Press (OMP), and Open Preprint Systems (OPS) – that support state-of-the-art open access scholarly publishing.
Similar to how open access research is research that has been licensed to be freely shared, read, cited and more, without restrictions or fees, FOSS is licensed to be freely shared, installed, and modified. More specifically, PKP employs the General Public License V3 for its FOSS and recommends that those using the software apply a CC BY 4.0 license to their open access publications.
The congruence in spirit and license that PKP has achieved between FOSS and open access has worked well in assisting the academic community in taking charge of scholarly publishing in the digital era. The resulting software has led to publishers, librarians, and scholars publishing millions of peer-reviewed articles and books around the world. It has also given rise to a new generation of FOSS preprint servers.
Building FOSS platforms leads to a distributed model of local installations that can develop regional technical capacities on a global scale. It encourages code contributions from among users, especially in the form of FOSS plugins for the platforms. It also facilitates users sharing translations of the software. PKP systems operate in more than 30 languages, while publishing research in 60 languages. In this way, FOSS reflects a spirit of cooperation and collaboration that underlies the spread of a more open science.
Open source + open access is also giving rise to more equitable forms of scholarly publishing. The best example of this is the OA diamond journal phenomenon, in which neither authors nor readers are charged for open access to the journal’s content. In 2021, the OA Diamond Journals Study led by Arianna Bercerril found that 60 percent of these publishing diamonds are using OJS, while they estimate that there may be as many as 29,000 OA diamond journals. If anything, this may be an undercount, given that in 2021 over 30,000 journals were found to be using OJS, almost entirely on diamond principles (see Research Resources).
All in all, open source + open access enables PKP to bring a refreshing and expanding openness to scholarly communication infrastructure on a global scale.
