Not Enough: Open Infrastructure Funding and the Future of Knowledge Futures

In a difficult but necessary move, Knowledge Futures is initiating a wind-down of some key initiatives and entering a period of regrouping after a critical funder unexpectedly withdrew its support.

Despite making real progress toward long-term sustainability; meeting, and at times even surpassing, our development and revenue milestones; and receiving enthusiastic feedback from partners, we now face an unforeseen funding gap that requires us to take drastic, immediate action. To protect the communities that rely on us and uphold our values of collaboration, systemic outlook, and sustainability, we are activating our contingency plan: responsibly sunsetting PubPub Legacy, pausing our hosted Platform service, and reducing staff. As always, we are committed to doing right by our users and team, and to sharing openly what led to this point so others in the open infrastructure ecosystem can learn from it.

As part of this change, we have set aside funding to extend the end-of-life of PubPub Legacy for eighteen months, until December 31, 2026. We will also be finishing the self-service export tooling we’ve been working on and a long-term static archive of existing content. This will give Legacy users 18 months to continue publishing on Legacy while they transition to another platform of their choice or long-term static archiving. We will be reaching out to collaborators who have already signed Legacy-to-Platform migration contracts to refund them. We will be shutting down the centrally hosted version of Platform at the end of 2025 and assisting existing users in transitioning to self-hosted instances or other platforms of their choice. While we believe there is tremendous potential for the future of PubPub Platform as a next-generation open-source CMS, we do not believe it is responsible to continue offering it as a service until we have a sustainability plan in place. We will be having hard conversations with our partners about the impacts of these changes and encourage any PubPub user or KF collaborator to email [email protected] to discuss this news.

We had no choice but to immediately lay off many of our staff to ensure we have the funds to responsibly complete these transitions. The KF team comprises some of the best developers, designers, relationship managers, and non-profit operations professionals in the industry, and we recommend all of them, without reservation, to anyone in the academic publishing community (and beyond) who is hiring for these roles. Please email [email protected] to inquire about hiring our former staff.

We are sharing the story of how we got to this point openly and honestly so that others in the community can learn from and avoid our mistakes. We’ve made plenty of them along the way, but the critical one was being overly reliant on one funder to help us bridge to sustainability — even though being able to take bold risks to reach sustainability without spending resources on fundraising was the purpose of that funding.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, funders in our space started pulling back from providing long-term operational support and began requiring infrastructure organizations to develop sustainability models so they weren’t continually reliant on philanthropic funding. In response to this feedback, we developed a membership model that asked organizations who valued PubPub to contribute what they could to its continued development. Over the course of two years working with that model, we came to an unfortunate realization: the communities we served with PubPub Legacy, an easy-to-use, free academic site builder, largely did not have the resources to support its active development. The communities who did have resources required degrees of customization and bespoke features that the platform, as it existed, was not suited to provide.

Rather than shutting down PubPub entirely or pivoting and leaving communities behind, we set out to meet the needs of both sets of users by developing a model where more-resourced organizations’ investments in custom development and hosting would cross-subsidize hosting for less-resourced organizations. To do this, last year we started developing PubPub Platform, a new version that allows us (and any technical team) to rapidly prototype, iterate on, and productize custom platforms for communities who can afford them, and then replicate successful models inexpensively at scale for communities who do not have the resources.

At the time, we developed a relationship with a funder who committed to generously supporting us over three years — funds that were intended to allow us to fearlessly focus on the hard work of building not only new infrastructure but also a sustainability model and information-sharing culture to accompany it. We embarked on bold hiring, development, and growth plans based on the promise of this funding and what we believed was a shared commitment to establishing a research ecosystem that openly, comprehensively, and frequently shares its findings, progress, and roadblocks.

Our new model was working. Feedback from initial PubPub Platform users — including, until this decision, from the funder and other organizations in their network — has been overwhelmingly positive, and we have exceeded our revenue goals for the first half of this year by signing multiple large-scale contracts to build custom platforms. We projected reaching sustainability by the end of 2026, and as a result began offering Platform migrations to all Legacy communities on any budget.

It was not to be. Last summer, we reported positive results in expectation of receiving the second half of funding that was promised. Instead, after five months of negotiation, the funder gave us a small amount of bridge funding and imposed a new set of milestones, which included just months to transition an affiliate to PubPub Platform ahead of everyone else and meet aggressive revenue targets. We worked tirelessly to meet those new milestones, which we did in the first quarter of this year. But after another 2 months of internal deliberation — nearly a full year beyond the original timeline — the funder decided not to provide the second half of the grant or any further bridge funding.

As a result of both that decision and the delay in making it, we were left with a very short runway at current expenditure levels, and are lucky that a prior funder was generously willing to step in and provide emergency bridge funding to forestall a more immediate shutdown. We have still been left with no choice but to take drastic action to extend our runway so that we can responsibly shut down Legacy over the next 18 months and regroup to decide how best to continue serving our mission.

We still believe deeply in our mission of making information useful. We also believe that achieving it will require reliable financial support for building long-lived institutions that can compete with the status quo, not only modest investments in tests of abstract ideas. Our community continues to inspire us by exemplifying what is possible when we all think creatively about affecting knowledge exchange. After all that we have accomplished together, it has been deeply upsetting to find ourselves at this crossroads. We remain committed to shaping the future of knowledge infrastructure and will continue to share our evolving approach, driven by the belief that open systems are still worth building.