Nipissing alum appointed to Order of Canada

Nipissing alumnus, John Willinksy was recently appointed to be a Member of the Order of Canada on December 31, 2025, by Her Excellency the Right Honourable Mary Simon, Governor General of Canada, in recognition of his outstanding academic career devoted to fostering public access to research.

The Order of Canada is the cornerstone of the Canadian Honours System and considered Canada’s highest civilian honour. It recognizes people across all sectors of society who have made extraordinary and sustained contributions to the nation.

Before earning his Bachelor of Arts from Algoma University, John graduated from the North Bay Teachers College, now known as Nipissing University, with an Ontario Teaching Certificate in 1972. He later obtained his Master of Education at the University of Toronto and Ph.D. at Dalhousie University.

“Having come in at the very tail end of a North Bay higher education era, in attending the historic, tuition-free Teachers College, I’m grateful and proud of having been able to turn what I gained that year into a career committed to public education,” said Willinsky.

Informed by his research on public access, John founded the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) in 1998 at the University of British Columbia. The PKP is a non-profit research initiative that focuses on making results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making this possible.

He later designed a series of open scholarly platforms for the PKP including Open Journal Systems, the world’s most widely used management and publishing software and Open Preprint Systems which provides everything needed to run a fully featured preprint server for researchers.

The PKP is now the world’s most popular scholarly publishing platform used by journals in 150 countries and 60 languages.

John is currently professor at Simon Fraser University and Khosla Family Professor Emeritus at the Standford Graduate School of Education. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a member of the National Academy of Education, and holds honorary degrees from York University (2008), Simon Fraser University (2009), and Athabasca University (2012).