project findings and recommendations report

#Project findings and recommendations report full
#Project findings and recommendations report software

There was praise for the flexibility of OJS to suit a range of needs, in general, and appreciation for some elements in particular: the peer review piece of OJS, for example, was often cited as being a real value, something difficult to do well.OJS, largely because it is open source, is economically feasible for many institutions that cannot afford commercial alternatives, but who have staff for a basic level of support.

There are many, both in technology and librarian roles, who feel strongly about supporting community-based efforts, when possible.

The value of PKP ’ s open source software.

Many interviewees voiced appreciation for PKP’s founders, directors, and staffers.

A deep appreciation, respect, and support for PKP ’ s leaders and mission.

The interviews with experts, current and former users of OJS and its competitors, and current and former clients of PKP Publishing Services offered a sense of current strengths and weaknesses of PKP and its offerings, and opportunities for future directions. In addition, the PKP Directors will be sharing the vision they have developed at a range of meetings taking place throughout Spring 2018, including OPERAS, CNI Spring Membership Meeting, the Library Publishing Forum, and ELPUB 2018: International Conference on Electronic Publishing.

Development and publication of a summary report to be issued by PKP’s directors, outlining future directions and seeking public input on these ideas.

Conference presentations offering background on PKP and progress reports on the grant, including at the Charleston Library conference in November 2017 and the CNI Fall Membership Meeting in December 2017.

Interviews with 50 individuals, both experts in the field and those who interact directly with PKP and its software: current OJS users from different institutional settings current and former PKP Publishing Services clients and some who had engaged in some way with OJS, but had ultimately chosen an alternative.

Creation of an Expert Advisory Panel representing those with deep knowledge in issues concerning open access publishing, open source development, and the competitive space in which PKP operates.

The community consultation offered a range of ways for the PKP team to hear from and interact with the communities it serves. The planning grant took place over the course of 6 months, from October 2017 through March 2018, and featured at its core a “community consultation,” designed to bring in a wide range of voices to inform PKP’s next steps. The directors engaged research and consulting firm BlueSky to BluePrint to work with them to examine the world in which PKP operates today, as well as the PKP team’s internal structure, and to begin to map out a plan for the future. In 2017, the PKP team received generous support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, in the form of a planning grant to support research to develop a pathway to sustainability and greater support for open access. To grow as quickly as their users need them to, PKP’s directors realized they would need to take more active steps to permit them to build PKP in a way that supports their ongoing operations, while continuing to invest in ways that help them evolve to support the changing needs of their users. While there are many ways PKP would like to expand their role in supporting open access, their team is very small and already working well beyond capacity. And yet, the leadership team recognized that the landscape had started to change and that there are competitors emerging. To support this work, PKP has successfully assembled a reliable combination of grants, donations, revenues from PKP Publishing Services, and in-kind support in addition to strong partnerships from both Stanford and Simon Fraser University, where the PKP is part of the SFU Libraries. Today, Open Journal Systems software, or OJS, is used to publish over 10,000 journals worldwide, the vast majority of them open access.

#Project findings and recommendations report software

Open Journal Systems, the open source software that PKP first launched in 2001, has permitted thousands of users in over one hundred countries to produce scholarly journals using the freely available software. The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) has been a cornerstone of the open access world since John Willinsky and his colleagues created it in the late 1990s. PKP’s reflections and future directions as a result of this process can be found here.

#Project findings and recommendations report full

You can read below, or view and comment on the full report. Below is the executive summary of the findings report prepared as part of the community consultation that BlueSky to BluePrint carried out between 2017-18.