Our Mission

PubPub makes knowledge creation accessible to everyone.

PubPub supports over three thousand communities, from peer-reviewed scholarly journals and books to novel community publishing experiments, and everything in between. These communities are created and maintained by university presses, society publishers, library publishers, independent scholar-led publishers, academic departments, research labs, ad-hoc communities, individuals, and many others. PubPub provides infrastructure for each part of the publishing process, from drafting documents, conducting peer review, and hosting entire journal and book websites to collecting and displaying reader feedback and analytics.

You can get started now by creating your community.

Features, Benefits, and Tradeoffs

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.

PubPub is built for communities of all types, but may be ideal for you if your community:

• Wants to create web-native, dynamic content.
• Wants to collaborate on content creation.
• Wants to integrate your content into academic systems and formats like Crossref, Google Scholar, and JATS XML with as little effort as possible.
• Doesn’t have high levels of technical expertise on-staff.
• Doesn’t want to manage your own servers and worry about updates, plugin compatibility, or users breaking layouts.

PubPub may not be ideal if your community:

• Publishes primarily PDF content, or has an audience that primarily consumes content as PDF.
• Needs precise control over the look and feel of its website or its PDFs.
• Needs precise control over academic metadata or output formats like JATS XML.
• Needs or wants to self-host their technology.

To learn more about the features, benefits and tradeoffs of using PubPub, see our Getting Started guide.

Technical Support

We offer forum-based, community support for all PubPub users. Feel free to post on our user forum at any time. If you need more support, consider becoming a KFG Member. KFG Contributing Members and above receive email support, as well as strategy consultation and training from our team.

For groups that want personalized support, we offer production, training, and strategy services for building high quality, effective publishing communities. Services include content production, editorial services, site design, back file import, training, interactive production, branding, and more. Learn more about our Community Services offerings.

Roadmap & Contribution

PubPub maintains a high-level public roadmap on GitHub. To suggest a feature, report a bug, or inquire about contributing, start by browsing our GitHub issues or posting to our user forum.

Mission, Values, and Sustainability

PubPub provides open-source infrastructure to publish knowledge credibly and tools to facilitate community participation. For-profit academic publishing models that mount paywalls to monopolize publicly funded research hinder the reach of public knowledge and thereby contradict the ultimate goal of its creators. At PubPub we value the creation of knowledge and advocate for the people that are contributing to our collective understanding.

In the last several years, many once-independent publishing tools have been consolidated into closed platforms. We believe researchers need open-source, academically supported, end-to-end alternatives to these proprietary platforms and publishing models. In our vision of the future, knowledge communities play a lead role in building and maintaining our knowledge systems, reclaiming territory that was ceded to proprietary solutions.

PubPub is built and maintained by the Knowledge Futures Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building public knowledge infrastructure. KFG is governed by an independent board, and supported and driven by Members. Membership allows individuals and organizations of all sizes to support open infrastructure; receive discounts on Community Services; receive additional support on our products; meet and share ideas with other innovative knowledge communities; and join a community passionate about the future of knowledge infrastructure and its development. If you value PubPub, we encourage you to become a KFG Member.

We believe that for PubPub to succeed, it must be sustainable for the long term. For us, sustainability means primarily being supported by mission-oriented revenue streams, rather than being grant and gift-supported or relying on ancillary revenue streams. Learn more about our sustainability plans.

Other Useful Resources

• Check out our Explore Page for a curated list of some of the most interesting PubPub communities (and we're constantly on the lookout for new ones).
• Visit our Help Site for guides and reference materials for setting up and maintaining communities.
• Subscribe to our our twice-monthly newsletter for useful community and product updates.
• Follow us on Twitter for great examples of communities using PubPub effectively.
• Browse our GitHub Repository to see our code, as well as the latest development activiy.
• If you have questions or are interested in collaborating, get in touch directly at [email protected].

—The PubPub Team