John Willinsky FRSC (born 1950) is a Canadian educator, activist, and author.

Willinsky is currently on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Education where he is the Khosla Family Professor.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and directs the Public Knowledge Project.

He is the author of Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED and of Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End, which won Outstanding Book Awards from the American Educational Research Association and History of Education Society, as well as the more recent titles, Technologies of Knowing, If Only We Knew: Increasing the Public Value of Social Science Research and The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship—the latter of which won the 2006 Blackwell's Scholarship Award and the 2005 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award.

In October 2009 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from SFU for his contribution to scholarly communication.