[1] It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments.

[1] Willinsky is a leading advocate of open access publishing, and has written extensively on the value of public research.

[2] The PKP's initial focus was on increasing access to scholarly research and output beyond the traditional academic environments.

This soon led to a related interest in scholarly communication and publishing, and especially on ways to make it more cost effective and less reliant on commercial enterprises and their generally restricted access models.

PKP has developed free, open source software for the management, publishing, and indexing of journals, conferences, and monographs.

The PKP has collaborated with a wide range of partners interested in making research publicly available, including the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Brazilian Institute for Information Science and Technology (IBICT), and the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP).

A growing number of translations have been contributed by community members, with Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese versions of OJS completed, and several others in production.

A German platform, based on OJS, is being developed by the Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS), Free University of Berlin and two other institutions.

[15] The PKP Open Archives Harvester is software used to accumulate and index freely available metadata, providing a searchable, web-based interface.