Episode 6: John Willinsky

John Willinsky recounts his journey from schoolteacher to open access pioneer.

About John

John Willinsky has worn many hats: schoolteacher, scholar, guitarist, and founder of the Public Knowledge Project. In this episode, he shares the story behind creating Open Journal Systems, now used by tens of thousands of journals worldwide. We hear how his belief in public education, his experience of migration, and even his band shaped a lifelong mission to make research truly open and accessible to all.

John is Khosla Family Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and continues to advocate for global knowledge equity. From tackling predatory publishing to proposing copyright reform, he sees open science as both a technical challenge and a cultural one and he's not waiting around for change to happen slowly.

Transcript

Milly McConnell (intro): Welcome to eLife Community Voices, the podcast shining a spotlight on the remarkable individuals behind research. Join us each episode as we feature personal stories that reflect the changing culture of research. We're here to shed light on the remarkable achievements and challenges faced by those who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of knowledge.

Godwyns Onwuchekwa: Welcome to another episode of eLife Community Voices. My name is Godwyns Onwuchekwa, eLife’s Head of Communities, and I will be your host today.

Today, we are joined by John Willinsky. John is a Khosla Family Professor Emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Education. In 1998, John founded the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which is focused on extending access to, and the accessibility of, research and scholarship. John is also the author of various award-winning books.

John, welcome to the eLife Voices podcast.

John Willinsky: Godwyns, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to this very much.

Godwyns: In fact, a lot I’ve learned from you in the couple of years since we've started running into each other. But it's interesting that the more I talk to you, the more I learn. You know you're a band member, a family man, a school teacher, a professor, a very passionate advocate for community engagement and community development. You're also seriously, you know, into research communication and dissemination.

So, could you start by introducing yourself and telling us a bit about who you are?

John: I guess I could start by saying that my principal trade was as a school teacher. I taught school for ten years and taught all the subject areas and with a particular focus on teaching kids how to read, how to sing Bob Dylan songs and how to write poetry and engage in science and geography and history studies.

So it was part of my inspiration in terms of becoming involved in scholarly publishing, that I had a background in this area of public learning.

Godwyns: Thank you.

Let me go a little bit into your personal life. You were born in Canada, but you have lived and worked in the United States of America for a very long time now. What has that been like in terms of experience, the transition adjustment and career progression for a migrant?

John: I would say that my move to the United States was an important refresh, really. I didn't move until I was in my 50s, and I think it's important and I would encourage others to consider this chance to get a fresh start somewhere.

After my school teaching career, which was, as I say, a decade long, I went to graduate school and I got a PhD and became a professor: first in Calgary, University of Calgary in Alberta and then at the University of British Columbia.

So the thing about being a Canadian is that the United States is right there all the time. In fact, we sometimes talk about growing up with our nose against the window looking in because all the television and the music and the influence of the United States is very strong.

One year I taught school, and in my classroom I could see the United States from the windows across the river in Sault Ste. Marie. It kind of loomed. And so the idea and the opportunity came up to teach at Stanford and to have the opportunity to work in the United States.

So a whole set of fresh new opportunities and the work I was doing at that time was just starting to become fully involved in scholarly publishing. And the United States is a very active player in scholarly publishing, and it seemed like the right place to give the work that I was doing with the Public Knowledge Project and with Open Journal Systems a new chance and opportunity. Now the project itself has stayed very strongly associated with Simon Fraser University, and so I've kept those Canadian roots. But the project also has a home now at Stanford. And so through that binational multi-university kind of affiliation (we have a lot of other universities involved as well), I had the chance not to give up on my homeland, as it were, but to explore new horizons and to get a fresh perspective.

The private university that Stanford represents was a very different experience than the public universities that I had been to. That offered opportunities, and I think generally it's a much bigger playing field in the United States than in Canada.

Godwyns: I have the experience of being a migrant myself. I can imagine what it was adjusting, moving from one jurisdiction or society or culture to a different one entirely. And this is something that is very common today amongst young researchers, especially, but many other researchers at various ages. Like you mentioned, you moved when you were over 50. So, what was the adjustment like? What did it feel like?

John: I would say some things are the same. I mean, a professor is a professor and the graduate programs and the teaching, all of that was relatively similar and that wasn't so much a shock. I think there's a new energy when you go and enter a new environment, a new awareness and sensitivity to differences. So I would often take it as a privilege and a duty to lecture my American students about what was wrong and what needed correcting and what was a better approach in terms of the work I was teaching about schools and education.

But then I had a lot to learn about the schools in America, the education system, the relationship of the states and the Federal Government.

So I would say it's a trade off, but we're curious people, we're educators, we're in the learning business, and I think it's important for us to be in a position where we have to learn and not just teach, where we have to acquire and figure out new approaches rather than rely on what we've done for a long time.

Godwyns: So we've mentioned PKP quite a lot and I tend to think that PKP is synonymous with John Willinsky, in a way. But PKP is a project that has spearheaded and pushed the boundaries of open access through the development of OJS, the Open Journal Systems that is widely used and not only in science journal publishing but beyond.

Can you share with our audience the inspiration behind inventing or finding this and the impact it is having, or you hope it will have on scientific publishing and communication?

John: I have to say, Godwyns, I started a band in 1998, the same year, and that band really began as a project that came out of the internet's capacity for sharing music, how to play.

There was a whole community of people that were putting down the great songs of the 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s, spelling them out, as it were, in tab, so that amateur guitarists like me could play them. Not quite note-perfect, but pretty close.

And so that spirit of sharing and cultural involvement and engagement was something I wanted to do around research.

But first of all, let me say that the Public Knowledge Project is really 50 or so people located around the world that are very committed and devoted to improving public access to research.. The fact that I started it is one thing, but the fact that it is where it is today is everyone's thing.

The project started, and again, how is it that an educator ends up involved, so deeply involved, in scholarly publishing, providing a platform that's the most widely used in the world now?

I think I'd have to say that the connection there is the public education aspect that in our concerns today with open science, our concerns with open access, we sometimes forget that open access is public access.

It's part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that people have a right to science and I think that applies across the board to research and scholarship.

So when I started in 1998, this was still the early days of the internet, the information highway, and I felt that there was a chance to make research a public good.

As a researcher, I thought the work was important and I enjoyed it very much, but I also thought we were doing the work on behalf of students and children, families, teachers, communities, and that work should be available to them. We were writing about them, we were using or at least researching those involved in education, and for me it seemed like the internet offered an opportunity. Couldn't we use the internet to share this research?

On those grounds I started the Public Knowledge Project as a public knowledge project, and the software came a couple years later when I realised that it wasn't enough to tell people to make your research public. I could pound the table and ask them to share their work. But how? The work was mainly in print, mainly in bound journals. So I decided a better approach was to help people realise the possibility and to help people in a way that was concrete and specific by providing a platform, an online open source (that is, free to use) platform, for putting journals in a digital form and sharing them.

And so the origins of Open Journal Systems was a way of giving people a means of sharing their knowledge. Open Journal Systems is now used by over 52,000 journals, and of those journals, close to 90% are open. They've taken the software from us for free and those journals are sharing that research.

Godwyns: You've talked about the inspiration, but when you are answering that question, you mentioned rights and you talked earlier about the inequity that we faced in this world in general. OJS is used widely in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and we know that in some of these places access to infrastructure is very poor. And it is obvious that your passion is what is pushing this.

John: As an educator, as a public school teacher, the ability of people to gain access to knowledge was very fundamental. And the inequalities in that ability to access knowledge, to go to university, for example, and to have access to the research that's in universities, all of that has been an important part of it.

But then as I learned more and more about the global inequalities in the age of print, there was a great deal of lack of access to print journals. And it just seemed that everyone had a right to this knowledge and we actually had a means of doing it: not shipping old print journals but using the internet. In the 90s it wasn't clear that everyone would have access to the internet. But in fact that has turned out to be largely the case.

I mean, the inequalities in the world are manifold and manifest everywhere, but the responsibility I had as a researcher was for research, the responsibility I had as an educator was for learning materials, knowledge sources and people's access to them on a global scale.

So building OJS was a very deliberate attempt to help not just the distribution of that research but participation in the research.

We designed a very light system that could be easily installed in a web server, or even a laptop, so that new journals could start, so that researchers all over the world could begin to contribute on an equal footing. We made very sure that Open Journal Systems was every part the equal of the commercial systems and of the systems used widely in the global North.

So we have journals in 150 odd nations publishing research in 60 languages, and to me that's a very important contribution. Remember I just was part of the building of the platform. It's these people around the world, one or two or three million of them who are publishing the work, who are doing the peer review, who are editing the journals, who are translating the research, who are in a sense responsible for its distribution. We've just provided one piece of the puzzle, and others have responded in ways that I found very heartening. And I consider it an honour to serve this community.

Godwyns: Thank you.

But of course, I'm sure that there has been challenges, concerns, things you have to juggle, the struggles. Or maybe there has not been any of that?

John: There have been challenges and struggles. And again, I'm very fortunate to work with a very talented team at PKP that have addressed these.

We've had issues, everything from how do you get the journal indexed? From the very beginning, we had a struggle with Google Scholar.

The predatory journals are another kind of example. There's a great deal of concern about predatory journals. And really my concern there is not that OJS is being used for predatory journals. We have 1% we think of journals that use OJS are on the Cabell's list and about 1.4%, not much more, are on Beall's list of predatory journals. So it's not that our journals are being used for predatory, it's that our journals are taking the brunt of the disdain and dismissal of journals that aren't well known, that are new journals, that are starting journals in the global South.

And again, it's a challenge that we're facing today, I mean, this predatory journal question, and we're addressing it with the Publication Facts label: I'd recommend to readers to keep an ear out for it because we're just rolling it out right now. It gives journals a chance to show the world “Here we are. Here's our facts label.” Just like nutrition facts on the back of a peanut butter jar.

This is how many reviewers reviewed this article.

This is how many days it took to publish.

Here are the profiles of the editorial board.

Here's a conflict of interest statement, and the data availability, and who funded the research.

So again this is a question where we take the challenges that our community is facing and we try to devise new strategies and techniques.

I think you have to understand that the Public Knowledge Project is a research and development project. We researched the Publication Facts label with high school students to see if it was part of that public access, with science journalists, as well as with editors and researchers and early career researchers in particular.

And so generally the sense is that it's not just enough to rest on your laurels or to look at the big figures we have in terms of use. It's how can we improve the quality on a larger scale? And that's been an important aspect. The Publication Facts label is something we're developing for the whole publishing industry because the question of integrity, the integrity of research articles, and what distinguishes research articles from other forms of information, is something we all share as a responsibility, and I think of it as a point of education, public education.

Godwyns: You know, in all of this as you have gone through your careers, obviously there are other aspects of it that potentially sometimes people don't remember or don't think about.

You probably have family, you have hobbies, you have children as well. And grandchildren?

John: Yes. It's not that I do everything well by any means, but I would say I'm very dependent and grateful to the support of my family, to my partner and Jan Hare and to the children and the grandchildren. And in fact, they're not children. They're adults. It's an important aspect and I'm looking forward to going back home to San Francisco.

We talk about the life work balance element, and I don't think it's a balance that suggests too stable a system. I think it's more ricochet or more of a scramble in which if I am away for too long or too wrapped up in my work, I just feel the gap. The band is a good example of that. A week without the band meeting or a week without having interactions with my family: I can just feel there's something missing.

Last weekend I had the grandchildren helping me on some of the data work. I know child labour is frowned on but it's been very interesting working with them. They have skills and talents already, they’re 14 years of age. I have twins, Jack and Finn, and they've been doing a little bit of data scrambling, wrangling, for me recently, and so it's becoming more of a family enterprise.

But I think the important thing is that you need to be grounded and you need to be connected. Having that connection outside of the work keeps the work fresh and keeps you vital and moving.

Godwyns: So, you have mentioned the band a lot. Tell me a little bit more about this band and where can I hear the music?

John: Well, the band has an academic history to it as well as open access. I mentioned already the band members learned how to play because of the sharing of music online. Kind of the real origin of the band was playing at academic conferences. I would go to education conferences and they were very… no, they weren't very exciting, I can't lie to you. They were very stolid affairs and we learned a lot, but what they needed was a little bit of a beat and a rhythm.

And so we formed a band and for ten years we played at conferences all over North America, education conferences. And that was really an inspiring aspect, it gave a whole new kind of vigor and form to the conference. A kind of excitement and vitality. So the band was a formative period for me. I mean, I grew up in the 60s, so playing guitar was almost compulsory, but the band experience that really formed and shaped me was playing in academic conferences.

The universities would sponsor us for their receptions. And let me give a shout out to Joe Kincheloe, who really was the inspiration for this band. And it was, again, that chance to bring people together and to build community. Because it's one thing to sit in a lecture and it's another to dance. So it is a way of sharing. It is public. It is an opportunity to build community. And that to me is just the constant goal.

Godwyns: I wanted to ask you, for a researcher, what lessons from your own experience would you like to share with them?

John: Well that's interesting. I would say that the process of migration, or the process of changing institutions: it's important to keep the connections that you've built; it's important to see that the network does not happen naturally, there has to be a reaching out, there has to be a collaboration, there has to be a sharing of the advantages. I think that aspect of getting buried in your work and of not taking the time to reach out.

I've heard from my elementary school students who would reach out to me in the last few years, they are models to me of keeping that community, of keeping that sense. I've lost touch with them 40 years ago and as soon as I talked to them, I remember them so precisely, the experiences we had together, the classroom times we spent.

So I think I'm encouraging this notion of being grounded, but I'm suggesting there's some mobility to that grounding and there's a little bit of extra effort: that extra email out to people, looking for them at events and conferences, looking them up when you're visiting in the cities and towns that you once lived in or are you returning to. It's an important one that we sometimes get obsessed with our own work.

The lasting aspect, the ways in which you will be remembered if you like, and the way in which your contribution will be understood is in that sense of how you have contributed to the spirit and to that general sense of being part of something larger, like a community of scholars or a community of musicians or a family.

Godwyns: So you go around, you get about, you get involved in a lot of events, a lot of requests to speak around open access, open science, open scholarship, whatever we call it.

I want to ask you about your hope and how you feel that the industry is, whether it is on the right course and whether the momentum at the moment is going towards the right desire, and if open scholarship is something you feel would eventually happen.

John: Ah Godwyns, that's a big one, and not a closer so much as an opener, I think.

But there are a couple points I can affirm: that we're moving in the right direction and that we will get there eventually, but I can't agree with the not-too-distant-future part. If anything, I want the change to happen now. We have a consensus around open access with the publishing industry, with the libraries, with the funders, researchers. We've all got an agreement that open science and open access in particular is the best way to advance and promote the progress of science and knowledge. So we've got this agreement, but we have not got a means of getting there and we are moving very slowly. So I am impatient and I have worked hard to come up with proposals. Maybe too hasty or maybe too slick in terms of copyright.

A very good example.

I feel that copyright needs to be changed for scholarship, but the industry is not talking about copyright reform, even though all of the other cultural industries like music and streaming, video, have seen major and in some cases repeated copyright reforms. I think that globally or starting in any one nation, there should be an effort among researchers and publishers and librarians to change copyright for the internet age, to change copyright that supports open science. Because right now it's very good for subscriptions and print, and it allows one photocopy to be made of each research article for a researcher. It's just antiquated. I am a huge fan of print. I'm not ready to walk away from it by any means, but I want the law to be responsive. I want the law to serve. I want the law to be part of the public good today and not just out of a long tradition.

It is to be commended that we now have this consensus, but I think... I mean, this is a kind of perhaps too cynical a way to put it, but how many pandemics will it take? Because Covid taught us a great deal about the advantages of open access and open science. And it's not that we've gone back. Oh no, that's not true. In a sense we have because the publishers that opened their work that was Covid-related did not continue to expand that openness and we are still in a slow state of progress.

I think that there is enough money on the table for publishing, I think there's enough concern and contributions being made around the world to publishing, that we can come up with a way to share the knowledge, pay for the publishing and reap the benefits.

So that's my optimistic, I hope, concluding aspect in due time. No, let's speed it up in double time. Let's get to open science in double time, Godwyns. That would be terrific.

And remember, the band is available. Come to San Francisco and we'll play for you!

Milly (outro): That's all for this episode of eLife Community Voices. I hope you've enjoyed it and you'll join us again as we hear more about the human side of science. To stay up to date with our community, you can follow us at eLife Community on Threads and X. Thank you once again to the Communities team at eLife and Neil Whiteside at Freedom one for editing this episode. Thank you for listening and see you next time.