PubPub Platform Update: Migration and Launch Timeline, Public, Sandbox, and Documentation

April 14, 2025
by Gabriel Stein, Head of Platform

In July 2024, we announced a new version of PubPub, PubPub Platform, designed to respond to changing community needs, feedback from users, collaborators, and funders, and the lessons learned from building the original PubPub Legacy. Today, we’re excited to provide an update on the status of the new technology, as well as some changes to our launch and PubPub Legacy migration plans based on community feedback.

Building Custom Knowledge Applications

We began working on PubPub Platform in response to growing interest from existing and potential users seeking enhanced capabilities beyond those available in PubPub Legacy, particularly in front-end user interface, workflow management, and integrations with the broader publishing ecosystem.Through user and stakeholder interviews, ecosystem analyses, and internal discussions, we recognized that PubPub Legacy—a one-size-fits-all academic publishing tool—no longer met the needs of an evolving publishing landscape. Today, adaptability to shifting community needs, workflows, tools, protocols, and funding models is more critical than ever. Ultimately, we recognized that in order to fulfill our mission - to help communities make information useful - PubPub required significant changes.

As we gathered requirements from our first potential users and started building the new platform, we realized the core need our stakeholders were expressing wasn’t a particular type of publishing platform or method. Instead, they needed the flexibility to craft their own platforms, customized to the specific types of information, tools, stakeholders, and communities they work with and serve. We’ve been calling these custom platforms Knowledge Applications, acknowledging that we’re no longer offering a singular publishing tool. Instead, we’re providing infrastructure composed of core pieces of functionality that, when properly configured and customized, become end-to-end applications for managing a community’s knowledge production process.

To date, we’ve used early versions of PubPub Platform to build custom Knowledge Applications for communities who perform preprint review, maintain repositories, and publish innovative, web-first journals. Some of these will be launching publicly very soon! It’s still early days, but we’re incredibly encouraged by the flexibility of PubPub Platform. In particular, we’re excited about Platform’s ability to meaningfully expand the definition of useful knowledge, and ease the workflows of our partners to be able to make this information readily accessible. In service of our mission, all development work is available to create similar versions of successful Knowledge Applications for communities who have specific needs, but don’t have the resources to build or maintain a fully custom application.

PubPub Legacy As Knowledge Application

As we wrote in the PubPub Platform launch announcement, we’re committed to providing existing PubPub Legacy users with an equivalent experience on PubPub Platform. In fact, we’re thinking of PubPub Legacy as the first Knowledge Application we’ll be replicating at scale on PubPub Platform. Though it won’t be an exact replica of the current experience, we are confident we’ll be able to provide an improved experience for most Legacy users. This Knowledge Application will include:

  • Innovative structural content editor: In the biggest change from PubPub Legacy, we’ve built a radically innovative new editor that allows users to dynamically compose pubs on the fly by transcluding metadata fields and entire other pubs directly into the content body. It also includes enhanced preservation and accessibility features. It’s completely unique, based on tons of research and lessons learned about how to allow users to create truly custom content formats, and we’re super excited to see what you and your users do with it. The tradeoffs are that it is less WYSIWYG/M, so users may need to preview content before feeling confident publishing, and the editor will not initially include real-time multi-user editing or commenting.
  • Flexible static site hosting: We’ll be providing an improved site template, which will be statically generated and can be hosted by PubPub or on your own third-party hosting service. Because it will be statically generated, your site will load much faster for readers and be far more resistant to traffic spikes and bots. We’ll also be providing the template as a standalone, open-source code repository, so if your team has basic technical skills you’ll be able to fork it, customize it to suit your exact design needs, and host it wherever you want. The tradeoffs are that site updates will take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to be made live, and some features, like commenting and submitting, will feel less integrated to end users than the current version of PubPub Legacy.
  • Improved Pub Types and Metadata: Instead of one pub type for every type of content, we’ll provide specific Pub types for journal articles, conference proceedings, and book chapters. These improved types will allow PubPub to better support the full range of metadata supported by depositing, aggregation, and archival services.
  • Improved PDF and JATS generation, including automatic regeneration when any field changes, producing full JATS bundles for downstream archiving services, and producing a more academic-like PDF template, tailored to match community look and feel settings.
  • Improved workflow tools, including task automation tools, the ability to configure highly customized submission and review workflows, improved discussion moderation, and new and improved, self-service integrations with common aggregation, depositing, and archiving services.
  • Third-party analytics support: PubPub will support your preferred web analytics platforms, with privacy-respecting platforms given special preference. This will replace the current, limited PubPub Analytics offering, but will mean that communities will need to bring their own web analytics if they want them.
  • Improved API: PubPub Platform includes a full content and workflow API, which will allow more technical teams to more easily build their own services and integrations on top of PubPub.

Responding To Feedback: Migration Options, Cost, And Timeline

Since announcing PubPub Platform last year, we’ve received valuable feedback from our community, primarily about the timeline, migration options, and associated costs. As we approach the initial target deadline we set for migration, we wanted to give an update on the development status:

  • Timeline: In response to your feedback, we’re pushing back our planned PubPub Legacy sunset date from the end of May to January 2026. Though we’ll start migrating our first communities in May, we acknowledge that we are still finalizing the PubPub Legacy Knowledge Application, and as such, most communities need more time and information to evaluate their options. We want all of our communities to feel supported through this transition, and to know that we will never turn the lights out on anybody. By default, your content will remain online and accessible to readers, and available for you to migrate to a platform of your choice when you’re ready.
  • Cost to Migrate from Legacy to Platform with Continued Use: Our goal has always been to sustainably provide the PubPub Legacy Knowledge Application at low or no cost to as many communities as possible. When we announced PubPub Platform in 2024, we asked that users who wanted to continue to use it pay an annual fee of $3500, based on the estimated cost of providing the service and uncertainty around how our new model of offering custom applications for groups who can afford it, and using that work to develop less customized, scaled versions at much lower costs, would succeed. We are now confident that both aspects of the model are beginning to work. We continue to ask that communities who can afford it pay an annual fee of $3500 for hosting and support. However, we are committed to helping any PubPub Legacy community that wants to migrate and continue to use PubPub Platform find a way to do so sustainably within their budget. Submit the PubPub Legacy to Platform Migration Form to discuss options.
  • Migration Options: We are still planning to offer the five migration options laid out in July 2024, but we can now offer more details on how we plan to offer them. To start, we are currently working on finalizing a self-service export tool that any PubPub Legacy community admin can use to download a full archive of their community, including a JSON export of all Pub, Page, Collection, and discussion data and metadata, as well as a static HTML archive of the site and copies of PDF and JATS exports for every Pub, that communities can use to migrate to other platforms as soon as the self-service tool is available. By default, when Legacy is sunset at the end of the year, we will automatically create an archive for each community, host it in static storage, and point each community’s existing domain to the static HTML archive of the content, ensuring that it remains accessible to readers in perpetuity and that if the community chooses to migrate to PubPub Platform or another service in the future, they will be able to. For communities that wish to build new custom Knowledge Applications on PubPub Platform, our team will work with them to migrate their content. For communities that elect to either migrate to PubPub Platform on their own, or self-host PubPub Platform, we are creating a self-serve tool that will allow them to import their content to PubPub Platform using the JSON export, QA their new site, and then switch their domain to the new site at their convenience.

Learn About and Test PubPub Platform

In addition to updates on our product development model and migration timeline, we’re excited to share more information about PubPub Platform that will help you learn more about it and assess whether it’s right for you.

  • Sandbox: We’re excited to announce that a sandbox version of PubPub Platform is now available for you to experiment with. Note that the sandbox typically resets several times daily, so no work will be saved. More information on accessing the sandbox can be found on our help site.
  • Documentation: frequently updated, comprehensive PubPub Platform documentation is available at https://help.knowledgefutures.org/
  • Roadmap: We’ve made our 2025 roadmap public to communicate the high-level roadmap for PubPub Platform development, and will update it roughly monthly going forward. Our roadmap is organized in three ways: by quarter expected, by status, and by product theme. For example, our goal by the second quarter is to build the tools needed to migrate Legacy communities to Platform — goals like the Rich Content Editor and Static Site Builder help us achieve feature parity between Legacy and Platform. Our second half of the year focuses on innovative features that give a broader range of communities more control over their workflows and publishing processes. To learn more about the roadmap and how to give feedback and contribute, see the readme of our roadmap repository.
  • Self-Hosting: An experimental PubPub Platform package is now available, and includes instructions for deploying via Docker. Additional instructions on self-hosting can be found on our documentation site. Note: we do not yet recommend running PubPub Platform for production projects, but we welcome your feedback on our discussion forum. We are developing guides for running PubPub Platform in production on cloud providers like DigitalOcean and Amazon LightSail. Let us know if you have a preferred hosting server you’d like to see documentation and/or launchers for.

As always, we are grateful for your support, and welcome your feedback, ideas, and comments. If you have questions or ideas about PubPub Platform development, please post them to our discussion forum. If you’re interested in scaling your publishing operations on Platform with us, complete the PubPub Consultation Request Form, or migrating from PubPub Legacy to PubPub Platform, submit the PubPub Legacy to Platform Migration Form. If you have questions regarding self-hosting or leaving PubPub, message [email protected].