In an Age of Misinformation, as ours is sometimes named, and with the shrinking of news media outlets and loss of local papers, one of democracy’s foundation stones can appear to be in jeopardy. On the other hand, the digital era has brought new information sources online, most notably Wikipedia which sees a great deal of traffic and much participation.
In addition, there’s another slowly emerging source of knowledge, representing the highest level of care and integrity, that is not as widely recognized. Through a movement known as “open access,” an increasing amount of the world’s published research and scholarship is now being made freely available to online readers.
Since the turn of the 21st century, the proportion of recent research made publicly available has grown each year, with now well over half of the articles published this year made open access. The gradual opening of research to the world is the result of a great number of initiatives and many changes in publishing practices.
One such initiative is the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which I founded in 1998, with the goal of helping scholarly journals to make their content freely available. One of its key strategies has been to use open source software principles to build a journal management and publishing platform – Open Journal Systems or OJS as it is commonly known – which we make freely available to universities, scholars, and publishers. It has grown in use over the last two decades. In 2023 more than 50,000 active journals were using OJS to provide open access (with only a few exceptions). The journals are published in 156 countries with research in 60 languages, and more than 12 million articles published, as the diversity of research contributions is an important aspect of open access’ global scale.
PKP, now operating out of Simon Fraser University and Stanford University, has also developed Open Monograph Press to support open access to scholarly books and Open Preprint Systems to support the early posting of research to speed up the (cautious) sharing of knowledge. In addition, PKP conducts research on the impact of open access; it develops new economic models for open access such as Subscribe to Open; and it produces a Publication Facts Label for articles to inform and educate readers about research publishing adherence to scholarly standards.
For research to serve the public well in this age, it needs to be both open to people and provide them with the basis of its trustworthiness. We’re hoping that one day, everyone will be able to exercise their right to access what has been learned of the world.
(Image by Olena Bohovyk on Unsplash)
Professor at Simon Fraser University and Khosla Family Professor, Emeritus, at Stanford University.