Skip to content Skip to navigation

Freeing knowledge

Prof. John Willinsky
Prof. John Willinsky

Freeing knowledge

How can we best access research and put it to use for the benefit of all? Enter the Public Knowledge Project.

By Kelsey Geiser

The intellectual inquiry occurring each day at Stanford prompts the question of how research can best be accessed and put to use for the benefit of all.

Enter the Public Knowledge Project.

The project works on how to make precious new information easily available to anyone who wants it. Education professor and project director John Willinsky has been working on the project since 1998. He began with the premise that research should be made more widely available. Since then, the project has taken a more technological direction.

It revolves around free, downloadable software that provides scholars with the means to launch new or existing journals and the option to make those journals free and publicly available. With this “open-source” option, the project aims to have many scholars join it in its mission to improve the quality of public research not only in the U.S., but also all over the world.

“We can make knowledge available online more easily, more widely and more cheaply,” Willinsky said.

The project involves mainly software developers, researchers and librarians, who together created open journals and conference systems and are currently working on an open monograph press. The journals system provides a publishing platform that allows scholars not only to make their hard-earned information widely available, but also to easily manage the journals, edit and peer-review submissions and carry out the overall publishing process.

Read more »


Get the Educator

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

Back to the Top