John Willinsky

I am a faculty member in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, as well as a part-time professor in the School of Publishing at Simon Fraser University. Although I began my career as a school teacher in northern Ontario, and have taught teachers for many years, my work has been focused for some time now on seeing whether research and scholarship can, with the coming of the digital era, be more widely shared with the world, as if people had a right to knowledge such as this, when it interests and matters to them.

As part of this effort, I direct the Public Knowledge Project which has been working for nearly two decades on improving the scholarly and public quality of research through the development of open source platforms (namely Open Journal Systems) for publishing peer-reviewed journals and through a research program studying the impact of this increased access to research and scholarship on professionals and the public, as well as on the global dimensions of the academic community.

My books include include the Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED (Princeton, 1994); Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire's End (Minnesota, 1998); Technologies of Knowing (Beacon 2000); and The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press, 2006) and The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke (Chicago, 2017.