If you log in to PubPub in the coming weeks, you’ll notice a different login screen. This is expected and legitimate. We’re writing this post so you can verify the change is real and understand what’s behind it.

What’s changing

We’ve built a centralized login system for Knowledge Futures. When you go to log in to PubPub, you’ll be redirected to a KF login page (auth.knowledgefutures.org) instead of logging in directly on PubPub. Your existing credentials will work. You don’t need to create a new account or change your password.

The login screen will also be automatically branded to match the PubPub community you’re logging in from, so it should still feel familiar even though the underlying system has changed.

Why we’re doing this

Three reasons:

First, we want your PubPub account to work across everything we build. Knowledge Futures maintains PubPub, but we’re also building and collaborating on other tools for open knowledge ecosystem. Right now, each of those tools would need its own account system. A shared login means your PubPub credentials carry over to new tools as we release them, without you having to sign up again each time.

Second, it lets us support login through common providers like GitHub and ORCID. You can use those to sign in or create an account instead of setting up a new password if you prefer.

Third, this opens the door to institutional single sign-on. Many universities and organizations already manage their own login systems. With this foundation in place, we can support those systems so that members of an institution can log in to PubPub using the credentials they already have. This has been a long-requested feature that wasn’t feasible under the old architecture.

KF Organizations

Alongside the login changes, we’re introducing KF Organizations. An organization groups together the communities and tools that belong to the same group. If your university runs several PubPub communities and eventually uses other KF tools, an organization gives you a lightweight way to see all of that in one place.

This is new and we’ll have more to share as it develops. For now, most users won’t need to think about it. But for groups whose work spans multiple communities or tools, it should make things easier to keep track of over time.

Access to the PubPub API

Alongside the changes to regular login screen, there are also two minor, but breaking changes to how you access the PubPubs API. For one, the regular method of authenticating using your email and (hashed) password will be phased out after June 30th. This will be replaced by using Bearer tokens, which you can create in your account settings. That also concerns the second change: for those handful of you who were already using an earlier version of Bearer tokens, your existing tokens will stop working immediately due a change in format. You will need to mint new ones in the aforementioned page.

What you need to do

For 99% of you: nothing! Your existing login will continue to work. The login screen will look different, but the process is the same: enter your email and password (or use your existing social login), and you’re in.

For those accessing PubPubs API, see the migration steps outlined above.

If you run into any trouble, reach out to us at [email protected].