25th Anniversary Annual Report

1 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Welcome 3 PKP’s 25th ANNIVERSARY 6 Governance 7 Research 13 Software Development 16 Publishing Services 23 Community Engagement & Outreach 26 Global OJS Usage 32 Special Projects 35 Financial Report 38 Thank you! 41 It is with great pleasure that I congratulate the Public Knowledge Project on its 25th anniversary! That’s 25 years well-spent - helping to make the results of scholarly and scientific research more open, diverse, and of higher quality and reliability. As a respected figure in the free and open source as well as open access communities, PKP plays a crucial role in promoting interdisciplinary research by removing barriers to scholarly publications. PKP’s commitment to research and advocacy has resulted in a substantial global rise in open access publishing. Notably, 60% of Diamond Open Access journals utilize PKP’s Open Journal Systems (OJS). As an institution committed to the values of advancing knowledge(s), interdisciplinarity, connecting research to teaching and learning, engaging with communities, and knowledge mobilization, Simon Fraser University is proud to be the home base of PKP. We look forward to working together for the next twenty-five years! Dugan O’Neil, Vice-President, Research and International, SFU Welcome 4 We want to welcome you to our Annual Report for 2022, capping both a productive year, as well as a quarter of a century, for PKP’s research and development efforts to advance scholarly communication. We invite you to consider the studies we’ve conducted on this global phenomenon and the updates to the world’s leading scholarly publishing platform. What follows is a review of the year’s activities and achievements in the service of open science on a global scale. This is the work of a talented PKP team that spans five continents (even as we strengthened our bond to Simon Fraser University as PKP’s administrative home), and a team that considers it a duty and a pleasure to collaborate, develop, and research with colleagues in institutions of higher learning around the world. Juan Pablo Alperin and John Willinsky, Scientific Directors Get ready, buckle up, here we go! These are the thoughts that come to mind when I reflect on the work done at PKP over the past year and how we are setting the foundation for a whole new level of activity for us going forward. Some significant accomplishments in 2022/23 included establishing ourselves as SFU’s newest core research facility, and creating the PKP SFU Community Advisory Committee to deepen our connection to our new home base, conducting a salary review to ensure pay equity across PKP, undergoing a team-based learning project on decolonization and reconciliation, kicking off our strategic planning process, launching a new website and investing in engaging communications and social media activity, filling our long-vacant Community Engagement and Outreach Librarian position and establishing a new Community Team within PKP, hiring our first dedicated UI/UX designer, and, of course, having our Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) Major Science Initiative (MSI) grant, in collaboration with our Coalition Publica partner Érudit, renewed for another six years. With all of this in place, as well as all the other accomplishments and contributions by our staff and our wonderful community included in this report, I can only say, watch out 2023/24! Kevin Stranack, Director of Operations PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 6 PKP’s 25th ANNIVERSARY Over the past quarter-century, PKP’s mission has been to enhance accessibility and visibility of research worldwide by developing free and open-source software for scholarly publishing, often used for open access. At the heart of PKP lies a robust global community that promotes collaboration, best practices, and mutual support. The community has always been crucial in the growth and success of PKP and has helped solidify its place as a leading advocate for quality open access publishing alternatives. PKP launched a new website, showcasing its community, research, development, and advocacy, as part of its 25th anniversary celebrations in January 2023. The website centers PKP as an SFU Core Research Facility and seeks to offer its users a deeper understanding of PKP’s values, projects, and community. Looking ahead, PKP envisions an even brighter future, where open access becomes the norm rather than the exception. With a legacy of 25 years, PKP is ready to continue its mission of making knowledge public through open source and open access principles. Here’s to another 25 years of contributions and advancements, as PKP remains committed to enriching the world of scholarly publishing and fostering a culture of fair and sustainable open access for all! 7 GOVERNANCE 8 Advisory Committee The Advisory Committee provides guidance on all important PKP activities, taking into account PKP team and committee reports. With 2022 marked by PKP becoming a SFU core facility, we also held many discussions and provided feedback about the process and its many implications, from finances to a new website. To add, we were delighted about the taking on of former Canadian contractors as SFU employees – and we have welcomed Kevin Stranack back to PKP in the newly-established role of Director of Operations. We have worked on new AC terms of reference in order to clarify responsibilities and to enable broad international participation. (Note: The terms of reference have been adopted in 2023.) The AC has representation from PKP Development Partners, Érudit, SFU PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 Library, PKP committee chairs, and exofficio members of PKP and SFU. Further, the terms of reference will now allow for additional members from regions not represented by existing Development Partners to be co-opted in order to represent and gain insights from the truly diverse nature of this community. During 2022, PKP activities and events have continued to consolidate and expand. The AC is happy to be a part of this development and to share its experience as well as national and international perspectives. We are proud of what PKP has accomplished in the last 25 years, and we will continue to support this development in the future. Marco Tullney, Advisory Committee Chair PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 9 SFU Community Advisory Committee The SFU Community Advisory Committee’s purpose is to oversee PKP’s engagement, advocacy, and support efforts within the SFU Community, to advise on best practices, and to provide a means for the SFU community to provide input to and oversight of the PKP as a University Core Facility. The Committee held its inaugural meeting in late 2022. The main outcomes of this meeting were to finalize the committee’s terms of reference, to choose a chair for 20232024, and to commit to ensuring that both an undergraduate and a graduate student representative be invited to join the committee. 16 SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 17 Upgrades and LTS Early in 2022 the PKP development team branded the 3.3.0-x line of OJS, OMP, and OPS as “long-term support” (LTS) releases. This change reflects PKP’s plans to consolidate the user community on more up-to-date releases by defining clear paths to upgrade that are better matched with the user community and by investing in making upgrades easier. This initiative is responsive to an open data set first published in 2021 studying, among other things, the distribution of actively publishing versions of the software. . This data set confirmed our suspicions that large portions of the user community struggled to keep their software current. It led to an investment in effort both by the development team, to make the upgrade toolset more robust, and in other parts of the organization, to facilitate upgrades among users of the oldest versions of the software among specific communities. This dataset was revised in late 2022, which confirmed our hopes that the community was adopting the 3.3.0 LTS releases. In 2022, 3.3.0 LTS grew to become the most deployed line of the software by a significant margin. 18 3.4.0 Software Development Meanwhile, the development team continued the development of OJS, OMP, and OPS 3.4.0. These introduced an ambitious feature set: a rewrite of statistics in support of COUNTER R5, including institutional and geographic statistics; a new submission wizard with a much-improved user interface; significant modernization of the source code including name spacing and class loading; the addition of referential integrity checks to the database; a new toolset for email templates and composition; and much more. OJS, OMP, and OPS 3.4.0 were originally planned for release in 2022, but staffing challenges and scope creep pushed the release into Q2 2023. The Technical Committee (and its offshoot Testing Committee) invested significant effort into redesigning the community testing process. This resulted in expanded recruitment and new feedback processes; it continues to be a challenge to accommodate the software’s testing needs during the release cycle in a way that does not prolong the release process beyond a full quarter of a year. As we are aiming for major releases on a cycle as close to a year as possible, this is a challenge we will continue to manage. Community testing efforts resulted in meaningful improvements to performance, upgrades, and other aspects of the software. PKP is delighted to add Devika Goel to our staff roster as our first dedicated designer. Devika is central to a shift in PKP’s development culture to a designfirst workflow, which will result in greater community participation in the early stages of feature development and will allow the development team to better allocate its resources. PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 19 3.5.0 Software Development While the 3.4.0 software development cycle was underway, the PKP development team began looking ahead to the 3.5.0 cycle. Design work began on a constellation of features that will be the largest development effort in this line: a rewritten submission lists toolbox. This will permit editors to better understand at a glance the status of the submissions undergoing editorial work, including searching, sorting, and filtering; it will also allow editors to perform certain common tasks without leaving the submission lists. The development team is also using this design exercise to refine its designto-development workflow. Many of the features in this list are commonly requested by the community at large, but PKP would like to extend specific thanks to SciELO for funding the development work and helping us to understand the needs of a large user community. 20 Translations PKP introduced Weblate to its translation workflow in 2020. Weblate is an excellent third-party open source software application that is used to help with the management and crowdsourcing of software translations. It is more featurerich and replaced an in-house toolset that had siloed translation work in a way that made it difficult to collect and share translations with the user community. Weblate has been extremely successful, with the total number of translations expanding to more than 50 languages. However, there are still aspects of the translation workflow that need improvement. One frequent source of frustration is the difficulty in moving translations between branches of the software; a translation contributed to preparation for the 3.4.0 release cannot easily be applied to a 3.3.0 LTS installation. This led the PKP development team to explore approaches to this problem that have been applied in other projects. We identified and selected a process called summiting, which tracks the translation requirements of each branch of the software and allows translations to be “gathered” for translation work and “scattered” back out for release in a software package. This process has undergone a successful proof of concept and work will continue to knit it into the software development cycle. PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 21 OJS PKP released OJS 3.3.0-9 through 3.3.0-13 in 2023, adding a new Icelandic translation and updated Chinese translation (among others). In both December 2021 and December 2022 editions of Details of publications using software by the Public Knowledge Project, significant portions of the OJS user community ran versions 2.4.8-x, 3.1.2-x, 3.2.1-x, and 3.3.0-x. Most significantly, the share of journals using OJS 3.3.0-x LTS releases grew from 17% to 46%; the share of journals using the outdated 2.4 and 3.1 releases dropped from 29% to 18% and 30% to 21% (respectively). We expect further consolidation of the user community on the successful 3.3.0-x line of releases, and will continue our general policy of supporting two major lines of software. This means formally dropping support for OJS/OMP/OPS 3.2.x when 3.4.0 is released. PKP is excited by the continued growth of scholarly literature that reflects the global nature of its community. PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 22 OMP PKP released OMP 3.3.0-9 through 3.3.013 in 2023. It is currently available in 26 languages. While the OMP user community is much smaller than OJS enjoys, it tends to exhibit greater institutional support, likely due to the nature of a scholarly press as a vehicle for institutional services rather than the historically grassroots tendency of OJS installations to serve individual journals. While small, the OMP user community appears to be growing fast, exhibiting a near doubling between the 2021 and 2022 publications of the Details of publications using software by the Public Knowledge Project data set. This is a complex data set and more in-depth research on the OMP and OPS user communities would reveal some interesting trends. OPS PKP released OPS 3.3.0-9 through 3.3.013 in 2023. It is currently available in 10 languages, with 3.4.0 expected to be available in 15. OPS is the most junior entry in the PKP software catalog, with its first formal release in 2021 – thanks in no small part to the motivation, funding, and experience of the SciELO team in Brazil; the SciELO Preprint Server continues to be a leading example of Open Access preprint distribution based on OPS. PKP continues to follow the launch of new preprint services based on OPS around the world – JXiv, an ambitious Japanese preprint service; engrxiv, an engineering preprint service; SportRxiv, a subject repository dedicated to sport, exercise, performance, and health research; and many others in Nigeria, Italy, Uzbekistan, Costa Rica, Myanmar, Germany, India, and elsewhere. 23 PUBLISHING SERVICES PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 24 PKP Publishing Services PKP Publishing Services (PKP|PS) provides hosting, support, training, and software development services for scholarly publishers around the world. These services, originally proposed by the user community as an area of need, allow editors to concentrate on publishing while PKP|PS manages the technical infrastructure, including upgrades, backups, and bug fixes with unparalleled expert support from the team and developers of OJS, OMP, and OPS. Where existing journals struggle with technical debt – a lack of local capacity to manage and maintain the software – PKP|PS offers a route to sustainability. And when scholars or societies wish to start a new journal, entry-level plans provide low-cost hosting, support, and complete software capability to start their endeavours. The Institutional Plan is a deeply discounted option for higher education institutions that publish multiple journals – offering a way for universities and colleges to provide local support to local publishing while PKP|PS looks after the servers, hosting, and software upgrades. With increased outreach and excellent retention of existing clients, PKP Publishing Services continues to see an average growth of approximately 20% year-on-year in the number of publishers that use OJS for managing journals and who rely on OMP for online book publishing. This year SportRxiv also migrated the Preprint Server to our hosting services. PKP|PS has seen consistent growth this year with 142 new journals presses, and servers, and 54 new clients joining existing hosted publishers. 142 NEW JOURNALS, PRESSES, AND SERVERS 54 NEW HOSTED CLIENTS 25 This past year we welcomed several educational institutions from across the globe including the Ohio State University, Loughborough University, University of Primorska and Athabasca University. Notably, an increasing number of new clients opted to host their journals with the Institutional Plane advantage of the full suite of PKP|PS services and contributing to PKP’s sustainability, with all funds contributing to PKP software development, support, and staffing. This year PKP|PS also piloted and launched DOAJ index support, updated client hosting agreements, and put forward a proposal to offer production and typesetting services. PKP|PS welcomed Mark Huskisson as the team’s first Publishing Development Specialist. Mark’s expertise and engagement in the scholarly publishing ecosystem have been instrumental to PKP|PS’s continued growth. Another important addition to the team in early 2023 was Shivangi Vashistha, Publishing Partnership Specialist, who brings her customer-centricity and focus on trust-based relationships to PKP|PS. PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 32 Community Outreach Team Further, looking to understand and engage better with users all around the globe, Alejandra Casas and Famira Racy took over the Communications team as Communications Coordinator and Specialist, respectively. Ioana Liuta came as Digital Publishing Librarian at Simon Fraser University Library and PKP, providing community support and contributing to instructional documentation and educational resource development. Emma Uhl, Publication Support Specialist at PKP|PS, with her experience in coordinating translations, joined the community team as the Documentation Interest Group PKP liaison. Another important addition to the team this year was Jeanette Hatherill, who, as Strategic Community Development Consultant for Coalition Publica, represents the Canadian scholarly community and helps coordinate outreach and communications activities of the partnership. Every year, PKP’s community and its contributions are essential to the organization’s activities. Software development and improvement, participation in events, software and documentation translations, and the role of PKP as a key actor in promoting open access scholarly publishing are always supported by and for the community. That is why, in 2022, the Community Outreach team grew to strengthen our relationship with partner organizations, financial supporters, in-kind contributors, and general users of PKP software. The growth started by welcoming Urooj Nizami, PKP’s Community Engagement & Outreach Librarian, who works to build and maintain relationships with diverse international community members and partners while coordinating community outreach and education programs. 33 GLOBAL OJS USAGE 34 The Public Knowledge Project’s Beacon Data—information about known public installations of PKP Software— reveals the extensive, global use of Open Journal Systems (OJS). However, the impact of OJS extends beyond the sheer usage statistics. According to the OA Diamond Journals Study (2021), approximately 60% of diamond journals surveyed chose OJS as their publishing platform. Moreover, the influence of OJS reaches beyond its extensive usage, particularly in light of the growing recognition of bibliodiversity as a crucial element in fostering a thriving scholarly publishing ecosystem. PKP proudly serves as the preferred choice for 34,000 journals, particularly in Indonesia and Brazil. OJS use spans 156 countries, offering publications in 60 different languages. This robust, worldwide community not only drives us to continually enhance and maintain our software, it also directly contributes to PKP’s research and development efforts. PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 GLOBAL USAGE OF OJS 35 SPECIAL PROJECTS PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 36 Coalition Publica Coalition Publica is a partnership between Érudit at the Université de Montréal and the Public Knowledge Project to advance research dissemination and digital scholarly publishing in Canada. Developing a non-commercial, open source national infrastructure for digital scholarly publishing, dissemination, and research—combining OJS and the erudit.org platform—as well as research investigating the Canadian scholarly publishing ecosystem. • CP endorses the diamond OA Plan • Strengthening governance: established 2 user groups & bilingual meeting practices introduced • Recommendations for improvements to metadata with the Metadata working group, 2 documents produced CFI Grants Coalition Publica $10 Million to Strengthen Digital Services Coalition Publica is set to enhance its digital services for the Canadian and international scholarly community, thanks to a $10 million grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). Under the Major Science Initiatives Fund 2023-2029, CFI’s investment will enable Coalition Publica to develop open-source, non-commercial, national infrastructure to support scholarly research, publishing, and dissemination. PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 37 JASPER PKP is proud to be a part of Project JASPER (JournAlS are Preserved forevER), an initiative to address the issue of journals disappearing from the internet due to lack of resources and awareness, focused on preserving open access journals for the long term. In collaboration with the DOAJ, Internet Archive, CLOCKSS, and Keepers Registry, PKP aims to bridge the gap in preservation coverage that currently exists among open access journals. As part of Project JASPER, PKP has been actively involved in Phase One, focused on reducing the number of unarchived open access journals. We have been working with our project partners to establish a simple process for publishers to determine the best archiving option based on their specific needs and capacities. For journals using OJS, PKP continued to offer the PKP PN preservation service, built on LOCKSS software, as an archiving option. We will also continue providing guidance on upgrading to compliant OJS versions to ensure successful preservation. PKP’s involvement in Project JASPER is driven by our commitment to making knowledge public and ensuring long-term access to published content. We value the collaboration with our partners in this crucial preservation initiative and are looking forward to future project phases to explore additional participation options for different types of journals. 38 FINANCIAL REPORT PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 39 PKP’s financial sustainability is based upon the development of diverse revenue streams. We continue to benefit from the support of funders such as the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada as part of our Coalition Publica partnership with Érudit.. We also receive generous financial support from our Development Partners and institutional members. In addition, the revenue generated by our Publishing Services team continues to grow, as more clients join us and receive the benefits of their expertise. Many of our funders, Development Partners, members, and clients have been financially supporting PKP for many years, and we gratefully acknowledge their longterm commitment to our work. Finally, as part of PKP’s acceptance into Simon Fraser University’s Core Facilities program, we have benefitted from an increase in institutional support from our home institution, and for that ongoing support we are most grateful. PKP utilizes SFU’s financial system and therefore adheres to all standard institutional budget procedures and policies. Financial Report PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 40 The fiscal year is April 1, 2022 - March 31, 2023. All budget amounts are in Canadian dollars. Revenue Publishing Services $1,334,124.00 Grants $685,422.00 Memberships $465,062.00 SFU in-Kind $157,396.00 Event Sponsorships $14,487.00 Total Revenue $2,656,491.00 Expenses Personnel Expenses $2,079,331.00 Infrastructure $211,200.00 Outreach/Community Support $119,807.00 Administration $27,248.00 Total Expenses $2,437,586.00 Total $218,905.00 PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE PROJECT ANNUAL REPORT 2022 41 Thank you! Research Support PKP takes this opportunity to thank the following initiatives in recognition of research and development support: • Arcadia Fund • Canadian Foundation for InnovationMajor Science Initiatives • King Center on Global Development, Stanford University • Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council • Stanford Graduate School of Education • Private donor, Stanford University Contributors Our thanks to the many individuals and institutions who contributed gifts of time including translators, writers, sprinters, developers, and testers. In particular, we would like to thank members of our committees (Advisory, Technical, and Members) and interest groups (Documentation Interest Group and Accessibility Interest Group). With special thanks to the following organizations for providing space, staff, and support towards PKP events: • The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies • Universidad Nacional de Colombia • Universidad Pedagógica Nacional • Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas