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PubPub

Knowledge Futures
United States
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About

Launched: 2018
Record Updated: Apr 18, 2024
Publishing system

PubPub is an open-source, hosted, free-to-use content management system designed to help knowledge communities of all types collaboratively create and share knowledge online. PubPub’s flexible, extensible system allows communities to create the dynamic content that best represents their work, whether it’s a traditional academic journal, a book, a repository of interactive documents, a blog, all of the above, or something in between. If needed, PubPub then helps communities integrate their work into academic infrastructure like Crossref and Google Scholar without the need to remake it to conform to legacy expectations of how academic outputs are structured.

Mission

PubPub exists to make knowledge creation and communication accessible to all.

Key Achievements

In our third year as an independent nonprofit, we've grown the number of communities that we support (6,000+) and executed on a sustainability model (based on Membership, Community Services, and partnerships on collaborative feature building) that will allow us to provide those communities with the assurance that we'll be around for the long haul. After raising $7.1MM in 2022, the KF team began 2023 by reinvesting in the technology to build out PubPub V7. You can read more about our Members, Community Services offerings, a financials in our 2022 annual report.

Technical Attributes

Open Code Repository

Implemented
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Maintenance Status

Actively maintained

Technical Documentation

Implemented
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Open Product Roadmap

Implemented
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Open API

In Progress

Content Licensing

all cc licenses available for documents published on PubPub. the platform itself is OS

Hosting Options & Service Providers

Hosting Strategy

Hosting through service provider only

Service Providers

What other tools and projects does your project interact with?

crossref, datacite, orcid, many others can be embedded within pubs (h5p, iframes, youtube, twitter, codepen, soundcloud, vimeo), etc

Community Engagement

Code of Conduct

Implemented
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Community Engagement

Implemented

Contribution Guidelines or Fora

Implemented
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Code License

Implemented
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Organizational Commitment to Community Engagement

We have a Community team with four full time, salaried emplyees, including a Head of Communities. This team exists to help build ties between PubPub's users, Knowledge Futures Members, and, importantly, between the team building PubPub and the groups implementing it. KF's Community team does this through a number of tactics, such as offering Community Services, publishing articles and podcasts on Commonplace, hosting Member events, hosting working group meetings, publishing KF newsletters, and soliciting new feature feedback from key user groups.

Engagement with Values Frameworks

KFG Statement of Principles based in part on C4DISC, Contributor Covenant

User Contribution Pathways

  • Contribute funds
  • Contribute to code
  • Contribute to documentation
  • Contribute to working groups or interest groups

Additional Information

Organizational History

Founded in 2018 as a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, Knowledge Futures was created to build sustainable tools and technologies for libraries, presses, museums, activist organizations, researchers, and others whose knowledge work seeks to serve collective understanding and the public. What began as a handful of grad students working on publishing tools grew to an organization focused on addressing the systemic challenges faced by public-oriented groups beholden to infrastructure that is designed with misaligned incentives and unjust power dynamics.

In September 2019 we formally organized as an independent 501c3 nonprofit.

Learn more about Knowledge Futures.

Organizational Structure

Business or Ownership Model

Non-profit organization

Full-time Staff

15.0

Funding

Primary Funding Source

Contributions

Funding Needs

Investing in PubPub means improving the open publishing experiences and capabilities of all who use the platform each day. PubPub is free and available for all to use, and we immediately make new or improved features available across the platform for all communities. This means that even when we partner with a specific group(s) or user(s) to further develop the platform, the thousands of other communities using PubPub immediately also benefit from that investment of time and money. The ripple effects of investing in open infrastructure are exciting and hard to calculate!
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