💎 In PKP's Archipelago, Regional Feature: Reflections from the 3rd Global Summit on #DiamondOpenAccess in conversation with Mark Huskisson (@markhusk.bsky.social)
This article is packed full! India #OA landscape, #OpenJournalSystems use, important takeaways and more:
pkp.sfu.ca/2026/03/31/r...
The Stockholm archipelago in Sweden is lit up in a golden bath of sunlight, with a mysterious mist hanging low in front of the silhouetted island. The water shimmers like a glowing, rippling mirror. The use of archipelago photography in PKP's newsletter represents the distributed yet connected nature of free and open source software as well as open access communities. The photo was taken by PKP's Jason Nugent on his travels.
📰 Inside PKP's community newsletter, "Archipelago"
* Interview w/ new Managing Director, Teresa Lee
* Demystifying #FOSS w/ Alec Smecher
* Reflections - 3rd Global Summit on #DiamondOA w/ @markhusk.bsky.social
* #OpenJournalSystems OJS 3.6
And more: lists.publicknowledgeproject.org/archive/arch...
And yes, I understand the reality of the costs of putting on an international conferences with all of its meals and showcases. I'm not saying this is wrong. But we all need to be honest with ourselves that having corporate interests underwrite and enable these events determines the sector narrative.
The framing of events determines the narratives of our community. UKSG, ALPSP, SSP etc are vendor-publisher-library events that work "together to share experiences and work together on shared challenges." It's a fine ideal, but they are imbued with the commercial imperative of profit and extraction.
Interesting contrast on my timeline this morning from LILAC on information literacy and UKSG. Both are being held simultaneously. There are 3 vendors at @lilacconf.bsky.social, meanwhile @uksg.bsky.social is a joint publisher and library conference (and those who supply them with tech and services).
Europe is getting serious about #OpenScience and #DiamondOA at the launch of Open Research Europe at CERN. A two-year development of Open Journal Systems (OJS) from Public Knowledge Project, @pkp.sfu.ca that will be fully and freely available to the global community of 55,000 journals via OJS3.6
Interesting to know what @jisc.bsky.social and #CAUL provided a commercial publisher to publish six #DiamondOA journals when neither invests in the huge non-commercial Diamond OA community infrastructure, the majority of which is based in institutional libraries. There is always money for the #Big5.
Sorry, I didn't get past the wine display.
The burgers and beer selection is quite good though, for those of us who just have to sit down and wait it out.
I mean, what could go wrong? A room above a pub in Hackney Wick to stretch the budget until April starts. Well, let me tell you what actually went wrong...
Hopefully I'm counted amongst those. It was great to meet you in London village. Shame it was so loud in the bar, I didn't gather that you were loud and Northern.
They seem to completely misunderstand that they actively ceded that data and research sovereignty to multinational publishers a long time ago and no longer 'own' that research or have free access to that information and data. The naïeveté of this myopic view and is frankly shocking and disturbing.
The complete lack of understanding about what it means to establish research, data, and scientific sovereignty amongst senior members of the UK's research community and government is shocking. Their belief is that they own that knowledge and are protecting it from future AI and big tech threats.
→ Reminder: less than a week before Érudit Town Hall! ⏱️
Join us to learn more about our activities over the past year, the evolution of our team, and our vision for the future of #OpenAccess.
📆 February 26, 1 pm (EST)
📍 Online
👉 Register: apropos.erudit.org/erudit-town-...
Come chat with us!
Have we created a 'free rider subscription' for universities. As voiced by Rick Anderson in his recent posts about not contributing to OA as it's not in his institution's interest. But I suspect he'd consider paying for a package of this size. It's a counterintuitive but understandable logic.
Contributing to OA "as an act of resistance" moves the bulk of this community's initiatives outside the transactional world of collections and marketised HE. It makes OA a charity case. How about the 130,000 items/books published on open monograph press or 17m articles on OJS over the last decade?
At the #CopimConference we're talking about limited resources to pay for funding OA. Do we rephrase the contributions to OA as a transaction for our paymasters and institutional SLTs? eBook collections of 700k are bought because they give access to the books, you get 17m+ articles through OJS alone.
My work is in that liminal space, the gaps and empty hallways between the publishing industry and this open community. Rarely do we get the chance to move from one (R2R) to another (COPIM) so easily. Charleston Asia to the DiamondOA Summit was another. I'm glad to know there are others in this space
I'll keep an eye out for the rainbow Dockers on my Derby-London train.
I'll be attending the Scholarly Social in London ahead of the COPIM Conference and to celebrate the end of the Researcher to Reader Conference. See you at Mables if you're attending either event or just in the neighbourhood @copim.bsky.social @r2rconf.bsky.social
www.tickettailor.com/events/schol...
Starting in 5 minutes.
A recording will be made available later this week if you can't make it to the webinar today.
A free and open source editor able to export JATS XML and HTML has been a long time coming. Today's update on the @pkp.sfu.ca roadmap includes the introduction of end-to-end production workflows within the journal environment for OJS3.6 🙌 [8amPST/4pm GMT/ 5pm CST]. www.eventbrite.ca/e/pkps-devel...
I find it remarkable that people pay enterprise sums of money for subscriptions that probably cost more time than they save. Teams is an awful deployment of a poor tool, Word is indescribably poor now, and CoPilot is just woeful waste of time and money. Wake up people, there is far better out there.
I'm doing a joint task where I returned to using @microsoft.com Word for the first time in ages. What an utter pile of [insert word here] that software is. Why on earth do your institutions spend so much money for what is, at best, a very average program? It's awful, crashing, buggy, clunky... yuk.
I mean... you would, wouldn't you?
Anyhow, I've become a distraction to @drbeth.bsky.social original post (sorry!). It wasn't intended.
In a quick aside I said hi to my good friend Ed by saying, "Hi Ed. Or should I say, hello Dr Ed!" He replied, "That's Professor Ed to you. Don't lowball me." So... I'm pretty rubbish at these titles
For clarity, I'm not down on UKSG. Most conferences have to be vendor supported to do what they do. Charleston has 30-40 sales reps from each of the large publishers alone, and there's no way I'd champion that. My world is an open science world and that's juxtaposed to Western 'vendor' conferences.
Yes, I agree. Meeting, learning, and moving things forward is the essential element of these events. The sessions themselves? Well...
For Asia, it was USD$250 reg and the Global Summit was by invite. UKSG is USD$1,100 for me.
I will miss you guys and I will get FOMO. I did enjoy UKSG in the past.
I've been many many times. Often as a vendor back in the day. I've just returned from 2 weeks work travel in Bangkok and India and the total cost will be similar to 3 days in Glasgow for UKSG. And I learn a huge amount in Asia. Attending UK events is a hard circle to square for the cost / learning.
Are there any redeeming factors of attending these vendor fests? Apart from meeting friends and old colleagues? And the bar, obv.