Knowledge Futures launches alpha code release of PubPub Platform

In July of this year, Knowledge Futures announced a new direction for PubPub and an accompanying plan for the organization to reach sustainability. (Please read that announcement before reading this update). Our migration from PubPub Legacy to PubPub Platform is an extended, collaborative process and along the way our approach is to communicate early and often. In the 2 months since this announcement, we have spent our time meeting with long-time PubPub users, KF Members, and potential new users of PubPub Platform. We also hosted our first Community Call on August 13th about this transition.

When we published our initial announcement in July, there were questions still left unanswered that needed the involvement of our users and Members to think through and responsibly plan for. We’re frankly blown away by the supportive, inquisitive, creative conversations we’ve been having with PubPub stakeholders since then. Thank you to everyone who has written in with questions and ideas (or openly published about them, as COPIM has) and those who attended our Community Call in August. We consider your care, interest, and concerns as a privilege.

Today, we’re excited to share the alpha code release of PubPub Platform and address the primary questions we heard from users since July, particularly around KF’s strategic outlook, our support for smaller publishing Communities, and self-hosting.

The Critical Inflection Point

It is our ultimate goal to make a Knowledge Application, or a set of tools for working collaboratively with structured information needed to manage and publish a group’s knowledge, on PubPub Platform available to less-resourced communities. This will allow them to publish a range of both traditional and innovative outputs at no or low cost. In order to do this, we must first ensure our organizational sustainability. Getting to this critical inflection point is our primary focus as an organization.

Our current approach—of working directly with an initial set of partners to model the first Knowledge Applications of PubPub Platform and making this work available as open-source code—inherently drives greater efficiency over time, reducing costs and enabling us to eventually offer sustainable low- or no-cost hosting to all groups, regardless of their resource constraints. We can create a flywheel of progress toward making information useful by aligning the resources and momentum of early PubPub Platform partners, who can both drive innovation on our infrastructure and serve as pioneers of a new culture for information exchange, with the needs of the broader KF community .

Critically, the early involvement of these partners is what will make it possible for smaller, less-resourced groups to participate in open knowledge exchange.

Engaging with PubPub Platform

Today, an alpha release of PubPub Platform is available, along with some basic documentation for running it locally! Groups that seek to self-host PubPub Platform will be able to begin this process, though we do ask that you please be in touch with us so that we can learn from your experience and improve our documentation. We will begin migrating Legacy Communities onto Platform by the end of this year.

Self hosting

The code for PubPub Platform is freely available on GitHub with a permissive open-source license allowing for free re-use and modification of the codebase. The self-hosted version of PubPub Platform will include the full functionality of its core feature set. The current Legacy code will remain open, but we will not be providing additional resources to self-host Legacy. Unlike Legacy, PubPub Platform will require no proprietary dependencies for its use and will be self-hostable on a broad range of commodity hosting infrastructure (AWS, Cloud68, DigitalOcean, Render, Fly, Heroku, etc.), likely via a Docker container published to a Knowledge Futures-maintained container registry.

Knowledge Futures will provide robust documentation for setting up and testing local instances of PubPub Platform, deploying to common platforms, and contributing to the codebase. At the beginning of 2024, we welcomed Emily Esten to the KF team as our Community Success Manager and they have been working on building out the required documentation to support a fully self-hosted version of PubPub Platform. While this work is in progress, you can find what we have here. For publishing and maintaining PubPub Platform documentation, we will be using Helpjuice, a knowledge base software much better suited to helping PubPub users find the documentation they need than our previous Help Community.

Community Support

Upon reaching its sustainability inflection point, Knowledge Futures will make a Knowledge Application on PubPub Platform available to less-resourced research communities that allows them to use the infrastructure based on their ability to pay. Our pursuit of a sustainability model seeks to ensure we continue to exist as a robust knowledge sharing institution for these very Communities to rely on.

In the near-term, we are actively collaborating with many groups on determining a path forward. In some cases we’re helping them make a case to their institution or library consortia for financially supporting open infrastructure and open, accessible scholarship. One of the primary issues in the industry right now is that so much important work and scholarship (open and closed) is produced without a budget or financial backing from home institutions, relying heavily if not entirely on volunteer work. Please consider us a partner in helping to align budgets with institutional values and toward open, accessible, useful knowledge sharing.

In other cases we’re contributing to grant proposals to help fund the continued use of PubPub Platform for some Communities. In others we’re discussing how to create publishing consortia under which smaller groups can pool resources to jointly fund and share an instance of Platform. This model works particularly well for groups that publish related artifacts, such as open educational resources and/or for groups that are part of the same institution. (On PubPub Platform, it’s possible for a single hosting fee to cover an institution’s or foundation’s Communities.) We are eager to have creative, constructive conversations to figure out a way forward.

Please fill out this form to begin this dialogue.

Making information useful

Some PubPub users have asked us about how we think about the usefulness of information (referring to our new mission) with respect to its accessibility. We think this is a fundamental question for this moment. When we discuss “usefulness” as a mission, we include the accessibility and openness of content and the process by which it is produced and shared.

Some of the fundamental misalignments between academia, knowledge creation, and scholarly communication (top among them, that of values, money, prestige, and job security) are at the heart of this question. PubPub precedes Knowledge Futures because we first saw a tool was needed to fix an immediate and definable problem: that of sharing more usefully, more directly. But we quickly turned to creating Knowledge Futures because we saw that the work to be done in shifting the posture toward and perceived value of usefulness (accessibility and openness embedded in our use of this word) in the space was cultural and expansive.

How information becomes and remains accessible is a question of systemic change. In creating PubPub we have tried to show people and institutions what’s possible when you can and do make different choices when sharing contributions to knowledge. In creating Knowledge Futures, we have tried to normalize these choices toward broader support (financially and culturally, for us and for our users). When we achieve organizational sustainability and when that support comes directly from knowledge-creating institutions themselves, it will signal a turn toward real support of open, accessible, useful, collaborative, exciting knowledge exchange. This is work that continues on.