I recently interviewed John Willinsky, best-known for the Public Knowledge Project. What fascinated me was the link between his teaching of reading to young children and his subsequent work in scholarly communications for higher education. You may not immediately see the connection. As Willinsky described it, “My life has been divided between the two. The first half was certainly consumed in classrooms. And the second half more on building this notion of a public knowledge project.”
The PKP came about while Willinsky was a professor of education. He discovered, back in 1998, that journal articles could not be accessed anywhere other than in the university library. He was running a small project about the use of computers in schools, and the idea was to share any available research – but the limitations of licensing meant that Willinsky’s own research on schools and children could not be shared with them.
Has the PKP achieved its goals? Only partially. Some twenty-seven years later, only around 50% of research articles are freely available (via Open Access). Nonetheless, it is an astonishing achievement to have made so much research freely available.
The PKP principle resulted in the development of Open Journal Systems, free software to enable academic journals to be published at lower cost. OJS is today available in over 50 languages, and is used by over 52,000 journals, with a remarkably high representation in the Global South, where there has been a huge expansion in the number of higher-education institutions in the first quarter of this century. That’s a success story by any measure.
The interview is fascinating for touching on wider questions, such as how to increase literacy in high schools – would our task be complete if 100% of the scholarly literature were openly available? Willinsky described the need “to educate the public for public access”, which is another enormous challenge. But on this, as on everything else he talked about, Willinsky’s inspiring “can-do” manner suggests that so many of the issues of communicating research could be solved if we approached them in the right way.
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