Knowledge Futures invests in PubPub Platform, a new vision for full-stack knowledge infrastructure
At Knowledge Futures our mission is to make information useful. Today, Knowledge Futures announces a new iteration of PubPub, “PubPub Platform,” to improve our ability to serve that mission. With PubPub Platform, we are responding with excitement to the lessons we’ve learned over our many years of community-led development by providing new, full-stack knowledge infrastructure that will allow communities to decide for themselves what it means to make their information useful. We are excited to communicate our vision for PubPub Platform and its purpose, as well as outline the next steps for those using the current version of PubPub (what we are now calling, “PubPub Legacy”). More information can also be found on our new website.
This significant investment in open-source infrastructure marks the beginning of a new chapter at Knowledge Futures. One in which we’re actualizing what we have always believed is PubPub’s potential to provide open-source infrastructure that undergirds trustworthy and accessible knowledge. One based on hard-won learnings, hardships, partnerships, and opportunities. One that is best aligned with achieving our organization’s long-term financial sustainability. We believe PubPub Platform is what our partners and the broader ecosystem need to improve how knowledge is produced and shared.
For most of our tenure working on PubPub, modes of information exchange that prioritize openness, iteration, dynamism, and utility have been considered “experimental,” if not fringe—an outlook we both embraced and challenged. We embraced it by maintaining an open-source, low-barrier-to-entry, form-agnostic publishing infrastructure that required little institutional buy-in to pick up and try on. We challenged it by supporting and highlighting the many examples of high-quality, effective publications that are realized on PubPub.
Over time, alternative publishing modes have become more mainstream. As the pace of research quickens and the stakes of keeping new knowledge behind paywalls (or within years-long publication processes) rise in the face of major global challenges, we find ourselves having different kinds of conversations about how people can implement PubPub to make their information useful. These groups require more flexibility and customization from us, which PubPub Legacy cannot provide.
PubPub Platform will allow us to partner with mission-aligned organizations to build full-stack knowledge infrastructure to improve how knowledge is produced and shared for all types of communities.
- PubPub Platform is a core set of features that allows us to work with partners to build semi-custom, full-stack knowledge infrastructure more efficiently. It is a move away from the one-size-fits-all approach PubPub has been known for. You can see demos of some of the projects we’ve already started on our new R&D page.
- PubPub Platform will replace PubPub Legacy at the end of May 2025. We will provide avenues for existing PubPub Legacy users to move over to PubPub Platform, archive their existing PubPub Community on Platform in perpetuity, self-host PubPub Platform, or move their content to another platform. We provide more details below, and ask existing users to fill out this form with any thoughts or questions so we can address everyone’s needs during this transition.
- We will not provide a free, centrally-hosted version of PubPub Platform at this time. Groups that wish to use it for free will be able to self-host it. Groups that wish to transition to other platforms will be able to use export tools that we will provide. We will reach out to existing Members to help them navigate their options. Although we hope to offer a free, hosted version in the future, at this point we are not able to do so in a way that ensures our organization’s long-term sustainability.
PubPub Platform
PubPub Platform is as much a change in how we work with communities as it is a shift in the infrastructure we’re building. As we published concurrently to this announcement, Travis Rich, KF’s co-founder and first Executive Director, has stepped away from this role to begin a new one: Head of Research and Development. This new function within the organization directly reflects how we intend to show up for our collaborators: with flexibility and creativity to define and realize new possibilities. Zach Verdin, our former Head of Growth and Innovation, is now the Executive Director of Knowledge Futures. You can hear directly from them about their new roles here.
We have learned that many communities want to work with us and pay for our services, but to do so at a greater scale they require a more custom implementation of PubPub for their specific needs than PubPub Legacy can provide. PubPub Platform responds to these needs by providing a customizable, full-stack knowledge infrastructure.
At its core, PubPub Platform is a centrally hosted tool that allows groups to customize their workflow and their publishing outputs, including various file types and applications. The possibilities of what can be done with PubPub Platform go well beyond anything that can be published using our current editor and site builder. In addition to providing this flexibility, PubPub Platform has also been built with no proprietary dependencies, allowing it to be much more easily self-hosted and deployed on-prem than PubPub Legacy. Excitingly, many of our first Platform partners are groups we were already working with on Legacy. We hope this continues to be the case.
You will find a full description of the new PubPub Platform and how we will be working with partners moving forward on our website.
Migration from PubPub Legacy
For current PubPub Legacy users, we will be developing five avenues for moving forward in the coming months, outlined below. Community admins will have until the end of May 2025 to work with us and their teams to decide which option is right for them; they do not need to make a decision right now. As of July 18, 2024, we will disable the capability to create new Communities on PubPub Legacy except for short-term projects requested by existing users.
| Option | Description |
| Scale your publishing operations on Platform with us | If you’re interested in further customizing your workflow and publication design on Platform, please be in touch with us to discuss ideas by emailing us at [email protected]. We recommend looking at our current R&D design sprints as a place to start brainstorming. |
| Migrate your publishing operations from PubPub Legacy to PubPub Platform and pay a yearly hosting fee. | This is the best option for those who want to continue to use PubPub as they have and are able to pay a yearly hosting fee of $3,500, which is our previous recommended Membership donation. This fee includes an equivalent experience to PubPub Legacy, migration support and forum-based support thereafter, along with access to robust documentation for Platform. |
| Archive your PubPub Legacy content on Platform | This is the best option for those Communities that have content on PubPub but no longer actively update their Communities or use PubPub’s features. It will ensure that your content remains free, open, and accessible. There is no cost to archive your existing PubPub content on Platform. |
| Self-host PubPub | All PubPub code is and will remain open source. It will be free to migrate to a self-hosted version of PubPub Platform by May 2025. |
| Leave PubPub | We will provide support and instructions for anyone who wants to remove their content from our servers and host their content on a different platform. |
We will continue to provide pro-bono services to underrepresented communities on PubPub Platform and will work with our long-time users who want to continue to operate on PubPub Platform to devise a strategy for doing so.
Pricing and Organizational Sustainability
Fundamentally, we believe it is critical to the health of Knowledge Futures for the organization to be supported by the groups who rely on its infrastructure and not by grants and gifts alone. The PubPub Platform pricing structure aims to realize our sustainability goal in light of this strongly held belief. The flexibility and customizability of PubPub Platform enables us to add research, design, and custom development to our suite of services and therefore to make this expanded menu of services the main avenue through which Knowledge Futures will achieve organizational sustainability.
In early 2022, we announced a plan to pursue sustainability via a combination of Membership support and revenue from publishing services. In the two years since, we have not been able to realize this model. The majority of our earned revenue as an organization currently comes from our publishing services—a program that has produced incredible publications in collaboration with key partners, but is not a sustainable operation on its own. While our existing Members have been indispensable to us, the case for a Knowledge Futures Membership has been a hard one for budget-constrained groups to make—especially for open, free infrastructure in a toolbox of other expensive, for-profit legacy systems. Our hope is that existing Members are excited about transitioning to supporting us via hosting fees, new feature collaboration, and Partnership.
Through recurring hosting fees for those using PubPub Platform and a smaller number of larger-scale services contracts that expand the capabilities and implementations of Platform for each partner (and range from about $35K to $300K), we aim to achieve organizational sustainability. On our website you will find examples of projects and/or partner conversations that are currently underway.
Anyone will be able to migrate to a self-hosted version of PubPub Platform that offers an equivalent experience to Legacy. Through your feedback, we have learned that removing proprietary dependencies so anyone can easily self-host PubPub on commodity cloud infrastructure allows groups to decide which avenue for using PubPub best suits their budgets and bandwidth. We plan to further support these avenues in the coming years by developing offerings for self-hosting support and managed on-premises hosting. In short, we believe this is good for partners and good for our sustainability model.
What’s Next
In the months to come we will be announcing our new partnerships for PubPub Platform and transparently sharing the demos we make in collaboration with these groups. We will be working with our existing Members and Legacy users to ensure that those who want to continue working with us on Platform can do so. We will be building out Platform’s core set of features and sharing demos of those in action to help groups brainstorm how we can work together. We will be doggedly pursuing our organizational revenue goals to realize this model. We will continue to lay the foundation upon which Knowledge Futures can become an institution that groups seek out to make their information useful and to achieve real progress. We believe PubPub Platform will make this possible.
We invite you to join our Community Call on August 13, 2024 at 12pm ET, or to send us your feedback and questions through this form.