Category Archives: oa.pubpub

Job: Open Publishing Editor | Knowledge Futures

Posted on by
Reply

Knowledge Futures is seeking a talented and dedicated Open Publishing Editor to join its Community Team. As an Open Publishing Editor, you’ll play a pivotal role in carrying out on Community Services on PubPub, our open-source publishing platform. Your ability to collaborate with partnered communities on services—which may encompass submission, review, production, and/or content enrichment support—will help advance our commitment to amplify knowledge exchange with sought-after open publishing services. Remote, full-time, $84,720 plus benefits.

 

About Knowledge Futures

Knowledge Futures, founded as a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, is a non-profit institution that builds public digital infrastructure that enables communities to publish documents and data more effectively.

 

About PubPub and the Community Team

PubPub—an open-source publishing platform used by over 3,000 journals, conferences, books, and other diverse publishing communities—offers collaborative document editing, robust academic support, and dynamic content features. We believe that open, collaborative, community-driven tools help researchers focus on their goals and further their work.

The Community Team engages directly with PubPub users and potential users via KF Membership, Content Services, and a range of communications avenues, from help documentation to newsletters to our publication Commonplace. We work as stewards of ideas, collaborating to turn plans into practice and influence cultural change along the way. Our efforts also help shape PubPub, as a platform that is responsive to user needs and requests. In 2022, the Community Services Menu launched, formalizing partnership-based publishing support with offerings that reflect user needs.

 

About the Role

Lead the execution of Community Services assignments, collaborating with internal teams to ensure projects are completed efficiently and effectively.
Interact and manage communications with publishers, authors, editors, and/or other stakeholders—gaining workflow insights and translating publication objectives into executable solutions on PubPub.
Creatively craft various forms of media, including video abstracts, visualizations, and interactive elements, aimed at enhancing the overall quality and engagement of published technical content.

Identify and showcase exceptional examples of Community Services efforts that push the boundaries of conventional practices.
Stay up-to-date with trends and tools in order to improve the delivery of our services.
Contribute to Community Team goal-setting conversations and brainstorms.
Experiment with and push the boundaries of PubPub to help create models and ideas for users and our team

 

About You

You have held roles in open scholarly communications (particularly in editorial, production, and/or creative capacities), have a sense of the challenges in the field, and have thoughts on how to bring about positive change.
You’re solution-oriented, communicate effectively, and thrive on engaging with stakeholders across the publication lifecycle. You enjoy shepherding projects from start to finish.
You have a keen eye for detail and are driven to maintain a high level of accuracy, quality, and efficiency.
You’re eager to explore novel techniques and find fulfillment in learning new things to achieve personal and team-wide goals.
You have strong organizational skills to manage multiple projects, meet deadlines effectively, and, importantly, to know when to ask for help or revise the plan when necessary.
You want to work on a team that respects your ideas about the publication process and models that improve scholarship, not just capitalize on it.
You want breathing room to experiment, be thoughtful, and get things right, but without losing sight of an active user base and longer-term goals

Benefits

Work 4 days per week with a thoughtfully distributed team: we were a remote team before it was a global necessity, and put a lot of effort into making the remote experience a great one. Last summer, we experimented with working 4 days per week (8 hours per day), and never looked back. Learn more about how we work in our

. As it becomes safe to travel and gather again, we are resuming our roughly biannual in-person team retreats at fun locations throughout the U.S., which began with our Vermont retreat in the fall of 2021, NYC “field trip” in spring 2022, and New Orleans retreat in fall 2022.
Enjoy industry-standard perks: a minimum of 5 weeks off per year that we require you to actually use, best-in-class health benefits with generous company contributions, 401k with generous matching, your own computer of choice, a stipend for setting up your home office, and the ability to work 4 days per week, fully remote — with re

Building open infrastructure step-by-step: COPIM’s approach to open documentation via PubPub | PubPub Community Spotlight

Posted on by
Reply

by Tobias Steiner and Lucy Barnes

Following in the footsteps of PubPub’s interview with Janneke Adema, Joe Deville, and Toby Steiner, we wanted to take this opportunity to take a step back and reflect upon the different ways that we at Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) have been using PubPub to engage with the variety of different groups that constitute the COPIM community of communities and to document the COPIM project’s progress over time.undefined

Right from COPIM’s very early days, we have been focused on making values-led choices about the platforms we employ to collaborate on writing and publishing the output generated throughout the COPIM project’s Work Packages, thinking particularly about using open-source tools and platforms where possible, documenting our activities openly, and working anti-competitively within different communities.

As Toby has previously written about in more detail elsewhere, for internal purposes, we quickly settled on open-source tools such as Mattermost for team communications, Nextcloud & OnlyOffice for file sharing and collaboration on documents, and BigBlueButton, Jitsi, and edumeet as viable alternatives to omnipresent corporate tools Slack, Google Drive, and Zoom.

COPIM’s Outreach Working Group – which we had established early on to keep in touch between the different Work Packages on the overarching topic of Outreach – conducted a short exercise to scope options that would align with our set of values and quickly settled on running COPIM’s dedicated website, copim.ac.uk, via the Gitea repository-hosted static site generator Hugo. Conceptually, we conceived of the website as the “formal” window into the world of COPIM, where we would document key facts, official statements, and funder-facing reporting information such as an overview of Milestones and Deliverables.

We also wanted to have a more vibrant and flexible addition to that website, a space that would allow us to experiment with multimodal publishing, ranging from shorter blog posts documenting project workshops, to more expansive advocacy papers and actual long-form scholarship that was going to be written by the Work Package teams over the project’s initial lifespan of three years. What we wanted was really quite an ask: a place where we could write simple short posts, but also these more extended formal pieces that might be downloaded and shared as separate documents, together with the occasional embedded video – all of which could be curated into different collections in order to best showcase our work! And this is where PubPub entered the picture. Attracted by its (mostly) open-source foundationsundefined and following encouraging conversations with the KF team jointly led by our former colleague Dan Rudmann, the COPIM team decided to use PubPub as our official Open Documentation Site, which – as Dan has put it in our first ‘Hello World’ message – reflects “our strategies and aims by serving as a space for open documentation. Herein we will chronicle our efforts in research and implementation as they occur. We invite you to utilize PubPub’s commenting and annotation system to converse with us, as well.” (An Introduction to our Open Documentation site)

[…]

 

 

The Case for PubPub – Open Access Books Network

Posted on by
Reply

“In 2019 researchers at Simon Fraser University set out to catalogue the world’s scholarly publishing platforms. They restricted themselves to open source projects, and yet still identified over 50 projects to produce and host scholarly journals and books. The platforms range from established (like Open Journal Systems) to fledgling (like Rebus Ink), and everything in between. Despite the team’s valiant efforts, it’s hard to make any comparative sense of the software landscape, given the sheer congestion. For would-be publishers, there is paralysis in abundance. And new platforms keep emerging, with Octopus and ResearchEquals joining the already crowded ranks. What to choose?

I want to make the case for PubPub, a flexible web-based platform hosted by a nonprofit, Knowledge Futures Group (KFG). The software is the brainchild of Travis Rich, who wrote his 2017 MIT dissertation on PubPub and then co-founded KFG, first within MIT and then as an independent nonprofit. The program he helped build is, in its way, a complete rethink of scholarly publishing—digital first, yes, but unconventional across the board. The design ingenuity is matched by a robust commitment to an academy-led publishing ecosystem. “In our vision of the future,” reads the group’s mission statement, “knowledge communities play a lead role in building and maintaining our knowledge systems, reclaiming territory that was ceded to proprietary solutions.” In a thousand small but important ways, PubPub is the nonprofit David to, say, the profit-hoarding, data-hoovering Goliath that is Elsevier’s ScienceDirect.Still, PubPub’s not for everyone, particularly if you’re wedded to the PDF, or prefer to roll your own server. But many of us want to dethrone the PDF, and for us the prospect of handing off server maintenance is more relief than limitation. It’s telling that the Simon Fraser team, when they set out to publish their report, selected PubPub….”

The University of Manchester becomes the new home of CrimRxiv – The global open access hub for Criminology · CrimRxiv

Posted on by
Reply

“The University of Manchester is the new home of CrimRxiv, a repository and hub for open access (free) criminology and criminal justice publications. This strengthens UoM’s reputation as a global leader in criminology and in open research. Since its launch in July 2020, CrimRxiv has freely shared over 2,000 publications, with nearly 230,000 views by more than 112,000 readers from 209 countries….”

New digital texts shake up monograph publishing (opinion)

Posted on by
Reply

“Is A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures—an interactive, open-access, born-digital monograph developed by Brown University Digital Publications and published in August by MIT Press—the monograph of the future? Asking readers to imagine Islam anew, as a vast web of interconnected traces seen through the prism of time, the book opens with a networked table of contents. Portals lead to different time periods across different parts of the world, inviting readers to explore Islam via a path of their choosing. In designing a one-of-a-kind trajectory that follows their own interests and queries, the reader, effectively, creates their own journey while traversing the world of ideas and evidence that has been curated by the author.

This groundbreaking interface, says author Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities at Brown, “performs, rather than simply states, the book’s argument—namely, that we see pasts and futures as fields of unlimited possibility that come alive through a combination of close observation and ethical positioning.” …

In working together to produce and disseminate essential knowledge for broad audiences, Brown University Library and the MIT Press are also addressing issues of scalability and sustainability. A critical goal of the series is to mobilize knowledge creation and sharing. To this end, On Seeing will comprise a publication suite that includes a multiplicity of forms. The print book, providing a revenue stream to help offset costs, will be offered at a reasonable price and distributed globally in order to reach the widest possible readership. The enhanced, open-access digital publication will be developed using the open-source publishing platform PubPub, which introduces a less bespoke approach to interactive design and development….

We are seeing the payoff from these investments through the expansive reach and impact that this approach to digital publication, together with presses gravitating to open access….”

The Case for PubPub · Elephant in the Lab

Posted on by
Reply

“I want to make the case for PubPub, a flexible web-based platform hosted by a nonprofit, Knowledge Futures Group (KFG). The software is the brainchild of Travis Rich, who wrote his 2017 MIT dissertation on PubPub and then co-founded KFG, first within MIT and then as an independent nonprofit. The program he helped build is, in its way, a complete rethink of scholarly publishing—digital first, yes, but unconventional across the board. The design ingenuity is matched by a robust commitment to an academy-led publishing ecosystem. “In our vision of the future,” reads the group’s mission statement, “knowledge communities play a lead role in building and maintaining our knowledge systems, reclaiming territory that was ceded to proprietary solutions.” In a thousand small but important ways, PubPub is the nonprofit David to, say, the profit-hoarding, data-hoovering Goliath that is Elsevier’s ScienceDirect.Still, PubPub’s not for everyone, particularly if you’re wedded to the PDF, or prefer to roll your own server. But many of us want to dethrone the PDF, and for us the prospect of handing off server maintenance is more relief than limitation. It’s telling that the Simon Fraser team, when they set out to publish their report, selected PubPub….”

User Satisfaction Survey | PubPub

Posted on by
Reply

We’d like to understand who our users are, how they value PubPub, and and how we can better service publishing communities. If you can, please fill out the following survey. It should take less than 5 minutes to complete, and can be filled out anonymously, or you can leave your email address if you’d like us to follow up with you. Your individual survey responses will not be shared with anyone outside of Knowledge Futures, Inc. We may use non-personalized, aggregated survey data to publish public reports about our users and communities.

About Community Spotlights | PubPub Help

Posted on by
Reply

From January 1 to December 31, 2019, 615 new Communities were created on PubPub. The previous fall, in October 2018, we had made a pivotal change: we launched a public “Create your Community” button, enabling anyone at all to create a publishing space on the platform. The positive trend line of growth—and the Community experimentation and feedback that followed—is now what drives our roadmap, Community Services, and endless learning. Across 2020 and 2021, 2,601 additional new Communities joined PubPub. This June, someone out there created our 4,000th Community.

[…]

The experiment begins: Arcadia publishing 1.0 · Reimagining scientific publishing

Posted on by
Reply

“Building on the open-source platform PubPub, we’re sharing the first iteration of our publishing website. In addition to posting our first set of research pubs, we’re documenting our progress in developing this new system for sharing science and hope you’ll provide feedback.

In thinking about how to share Arcadia’s research, we wanted to keep features of traditional publishing that have been honed over centuries, but improve upon what hasn’t quite adapted to the nature of modern science and technology. We have a unique opportunity to use our own research to develop mechanisms of sharing and quality control that can be more agile and adaptable. Our initial attempt is outlined here and we will continue to iterate upon it, always keeping the advancement of knowledge as our guiding principle when making decisions on what to try next.

This pub is intended to help you understand our thinking thus far, to provide a sense of what we’ve done and how the platform works, and to serve as a place to provide feedback on our strategy and the platform itself….”

The experiment begins: Arcadia publishing 1.0 · Reimagining scientific publishing

Posted on by
Reply

“In thinking about how to share Arcadia’s research, we wanted to keep features of traditional publishing that have been honed over centuries, but improve upon what hasn’t quite adapted to the nature of modern science and technology. We have a unique opportunity to use our own research to develop mechanisms of sharing and quality control that can be more agile and adaptable. Our initial attempt is outlined here and we will continue to iterate upon it, always keeping the advancement of knowledge as our guiding principle when making decisions on what to try next….

We are reimagining scientific publishing — sharing our work early and often, maximizing utility and reusability, and improving our science on the basis of public feedback.

This is our first draft. We have ambitious goals and we’re committed to replicable long-term solutions, but we also know that “perfection is the enemy of good.” We’re using this platform to release findings now rather than hiding them until we’ve gotten everything exactly how we want it. Readers can think of the pubs on this platform as drafts that will evolve over time, shaped by public feedback. The same goes for the platform itself! We’re treating our publishing project like an experiment — we’re not sure where we will land, but we can only learn if we try. In this pub, we’re sharing our strategy and the reasoning behind some of our key decisions, highlighting features we’re excited about and areas for improvement. …

Charting our Pathway to Sustainability | KFG Notes

Posted on by
Reply

Knowledge Futures Group is a non-profit technology organization that builds infrastructure for a more effective, equitable, and sustainable knowledge economy. We have two primary open-source products: PubPub for publishing documents and Underlay for producing datasets. Our work empowers communities with tools to publish knowledge and collaborate with their community members.

[…]

Watch the Webinar ? · Open Knowledge Institutions : Reinventing Universities

Posted on by
Reply

Recently, Open Knowledge Institutions was published openly by the MIT Press. Uniquely, this title went through a radically collaborative and transparent publication process, from its original drafting through the facilitation of the Book Sprints team, to its open review period as the inaugural title in the MIT Press’s Works in Progress program, to its open publication both on PubPub and on MIT Press Direct.

Our webinar “An Open Process for Open Knowledge,” hosted virtually on September 8, 2021 sought to explore this process with those involved. We discussed the benefits of and considerations around engaging in such an open process and how this connects to the subject matter of the book itself. Below is a recording of the event.

Adema (2021) Versioning and Iterative Publishing | Commonplace

Posted on by
Reply

 Adema, J. (2021). Versioning and Iterative Publishing. Commonplace. https://doi.org/10.21428/6ffd8432.42408f5b

Change-logs or revision histories are increasingly integrated — both in the back and frontend — into platforms that accommodate collaborative and experimental forms of online academic writing in the humanities. A well-known feature from platforms such as Wikipedia and Github or Gitlab, additionally PubPub (the platform that hosts the Commonplace and is regularly used for humanities journal and book publishing) launched its Activity Dashboard recently, which provides a filterable log of changes made to a ‘pub’ or ‘collection.’ A version history remains available for readers to explore earlier releases, while a ‘pub history feature’ allows authors or communities the ability to return to or reinstall previous pub drafts.

Knowledge Futures Group has a new website

Posted on by

New website!

Knowledge Futures Group builds infrastructure for a more effective, equitable, and sustainable knowledge economy.

 

Knowledge Futures Group is an independent nonprofit organization powered by academic, industry, and advocacy groups. Together we build and support products and protocols to make knowledge open and accessible to all.

Founded in 2018 as a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, Knowledge Futures Group was created to build sustainable tools and technologies for libraries, presses, museums, activist organizations, researchers, and others whose knowledge work seeks to serve collective understanding and the public. What began as a handful of grad students working on publishing tools grew to an organization focused on addressing the systemic challenges faced by public-oriented groups beholden to infrastructure that is designed with misaligned incentives and unjust power dynamics.

In September 2019 we formally organized as an independent 501c3 nonprofit. Today, we are committed to building a full-stack of technology protocols and products that demonstrate an effective, equitable, and sustainable knowledge economy is possible. We work with partners to design for interoperability and to catalyze a distributed ecosystem of development.

How to start your own preprint review community on PubPub · PubPub Help

Posted on by

“Since we launched the Connections feature last year, we’ve been thrilled to see communities on PubPub using it for everything from supplementary material to editorial commentary and beyond. One of the most exciting uses of the feature has been publishing reviews of preprints, most prominently demonstrated by the MIT Press’s groundbreaking Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (RR:C19) journal, published in collaboration with UC Berkeley.undefined

We’re particularly excited about this use-case because we think the “Publish, Review, Curate”undefined models being pioneered by Rapid Reviews and other innovative groups like PREReview, Peer Community In…, Review Commons, and eLife’s Sciety could fundamentally change scientific publishing — making it more open, more transparent, more efficient, and, crucially, more equitable by recognizing evaluation as an essential part of scientific careers.

The community is still working on the processes, workflows, standards, and values that will support this emergent form of publishing. But that shouldn’t stop anyone who wants to explore these models from starting now.

With PubPub, anyone can publish and distribute meaningful, impactful reviews with appropriate metadata that can be picked up by aggregators in about an hour — at no cost and with no technical expertise required….”