On 17 July 2024, Knowledge Futures announced a new iteration of PubPub called PubPub Platform which is set to replace the current version of PubPub—now called PubPub Legacy—in May 2025. Existing PubPub Legacy users will be required to do one of the following: migrate over to PubPub Platform (for an annual hosting fee of 3500 USD); archive their PubPub content on Platform (at no cost); self-host their own version of PubPub Platform; or leave PubPub, potentially migrating to another publishing platform.
As experts in the field of open access publishing, the Copim team are often approached by authors and publishers seeking guidance on suitable publication platforms. Without hesitation, we have recommended PubPub to several small presses, journals, authors and communities, and have included the platform in our own research on open publication infrastructures. We also use PubPub for our own documentation sites (at Copim and the Open Book Collective, for one of our experimental book pilots, Ecological Rewriting, and for an important conference we organised), and so we too are questioning how this news will impact our own workflows and published content. We feel accountable to both the wider Copim community and to many of the other communities who have put time and resources into adopting PubPub who feel concerned about the impact of this recent announcement.
In this co-authored post we will share some of our initial concerns about PubPub’s announcement including thoughts around:
Self-hosting
Financial pressures
The importance of community governance
Our questions for Knowledge Futures
We publish this response in the spirit of openness and collaboration, and we would welcome the opportunity to work with Knowledge Futures to develop plans for supporting the many communities of publishers and writers impacted by this announcement. All at Copim have enjoyed working with Knowledge Futures in the past and we benefitted from their support when applying for funding for the Open Book Futures project. We have also shared this post directly with Knowledge Futures via their feedback form shortly before publication.
1. Self-hosting
1.1 Our support for a renewed commitment to self-hosted versions
As we have argued elsewhere, the tenet of No Open Access Without Open Infrastructure is a key motivation behind everything we do within the Copim community (see Adema et al. (2023); Steiner (2021); Steiner & Barnes (2023)). This commitment entails our strong ethical preference for using Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) wherever possible, with one of the main defining characteristics of FLOSS being that the core functionality of an openly licensed software package can be replicated on one’s own server.
We have long been in conversations with PubPub about eventually supporting a fully open source software stack, which is something that many in the wider landscape have been calling for for quite some time. We therefore welcomed the 2022 announcement published by Gabe Stein, PubPub’s Head of Platform, in which he shared details regarding why some proprietary dependencies have been part of PubPub from the get-go and the team’s plans to remove those dependencies.
So we are very supportive of PubPub’s stated aim to provide a self-hostable version of the software stack that makes PubPub a versatile publishing platform, and we are keen to learn more about how we might run a self-hosted version of PubPub.
1.2 Our concerns about timescales and feasibility of self-hosting
Whilst we appreciate and welcome Knowledge Futures’ renewed commitment to supporting self-hosted versions of PubPub, their recent announcement did leave some questions unanswered, particularly regarding issues of existing proprietary dependencies. For example, if the new, advanced software stack that will form PubPub Platform is to be made available for self-hosting, will ongoing and future core developments and updates also be open source? Knowledge Futures will also need to be clear on whether full functionality will be available in the self-hosted version or whether core functions will be held back for the cloud-hosted PubPub Platform only — and if so, for how long.
Additionally, will it practically be feasible for individuals and communities to self-host PubPub? In the opinion of our community’s technical experts, there is a lot of work to be done in terms of documentation and development before the current PubPub Legacy code published on GitHub under a GPL-2.0 license will be ready for self-hosting. Even if this work on PubPub Platform has been done and is yet to be unveiled, the proposed May 2025 timeline is very tight for communities to familiarise themselves with it for self-hosting and migration. Extensive documentation, technical specifications, and detailed instructions will be required, and these will need to support deployment in various contexts (e.g., Docker or Kubernetes).
Even with comprehensive documentation, self-hosting will not be viable for many of the smaller organisations and projects that use PubPub, who will have neither the technical nor the financial resources to set up and maintain their own version. In the past, PubPub explained that while ‘PubPub is built for communities of all types’, it ‘may be ideal for you if your community: [...] 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’.
We are concerned that these communities—who were attracted to PubPub for its relative technical ease—may now be cut off from a platform they have come to rely on.
2. Financial pressures
2.1 The financial pressures on open infrastructures
The whole Copim community sympathises with the struggles articulated in this announcement from Knowledge Futures. Introducing their new model, Knowledge Futures explain that this restructure is ‘critical’ for their financial health, as a 3-year plan to pursue sustainability through membership payments (launched in early 2022) has not generated enough revenue to support their operations long-term. In their announcement, Knowledge Futures express their gratitude to existing members and their hope that these members will be ‘excited about transitioning to supporting us via hosting fees, new feature collaboration, and Partnership’.
At Copim, we recognise the financial pressures on open infrastructures and the corresponding need to establish sustainable income streams to support the day-to-day running of any kind of platform. This is particularly challenging when the communities your platform serves include smaller not-for-profit and volunteer organisations with limited resources. We have always sought to work with and include these communities, and this has shaped the financial models for many of our initiatives. For example, the model we are seeking to implement at Thoth Open Metadata aims to make the paid-for component of its services (aka Thoth Plus) as affordable as possible for even the smallest entity. Another Copim infrastructure, the Open Book Collective, takes a small percentage of the income secured for member presses from library members to support its activities, so that each press contributes only in proportion to the amount it receives from its involvement in the OBC.
The Copim community has benefitted from grant funding to build our infrastructures and to support our work while we devise sustainable revenue models, and this has been vital to our success thus far. Indeed, a key argument in our funding bid was that this initial grant funding was necessary to support us whilst we built robust revenue models that would outlast the grant period. We understand that these things are difficult and take time to develop.
Given our Copim community values and approach to funding initiatives, we have always admired the way that PubPub has focused on providing a free (small) communities-focused platform whilst taking time to devise a business model in which the platform is sustained for all through payments from larger communities or those able to pay a membership fee. As Knowledge Futures stated in 2021:
we’re committed to making PubPub open and easily accessible to a wide range of groups. That means we’re committed to providing a free version of PubPub forever, releasing open-source code, and operating under non-profit, sustainable, researcher-friendly business models.
The removal, in May 2025, of the option for a free, supported community service on PubPub will be a major issue for many of the communities and journals the platform currently supports. For example, the change might impact several of the experimental book publishing projects our Experimental Publishing Group have researched over the past five years, including MIT Press’s experiments, Arizona State University’s Frankenbook, and Goldsmiths Press’ award-winning Phone & Spear: A Yuṯa Anthropology. PubPub is home to some fantastic and inspiring publishing projects, including mediastudies.press, darkmatter journal, Reviews in DH, AfricArXiv, Creative Commons for Books, and many more. Many of these projects might face difficult questions about how to continue in the wake of this news.
In their announcement, Knowledge Futures state that they will 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’. This recognition of PubPub’s role as a valued home for underrepresented communities is welcome, and many will appreciate this willingness to help users devise new strategies. However, further clarity is needed on how ‘underrepresented communities’ will be identified and how they will be supported. And, we hope that further details for collaborating with and supporting existing users will be forthcoming.
More broadly, for us this announcement demonstrates that essential infrastructure for smaller and more fragile communities requires a community governance model if those small communities are to have confidence that the infrastructure will continue to serve them.
Of course, this would not solve sustainability challenges by itself, but it would mean that communities were fully aware of those challenges, could contribute to potential solutions, and could have a say in whatever the future of the infrastructure might be—without the risk of a sudden and unexpected change in overall strategy, however necessary those in charge believe that change to be. Small initiatives may not have been able to invest money into PubPub, but they did invest time, energy, ideas, and work, and we hope that with its new direction, PubPub will continue to treat those investments with care and respect. We are interested to know whether Knowledge Futures has plans to adopt any community governance principles, so that smaller and more fragile communities that rely on it can play a more engaged role in its future.
4. Our questions for Knowledge Futures
These questions distill and build on the issues and concerns raised above.
We would be interested in collaborating with Knowledge Futures to develop pathways for users who cannot afford the new hosting fees. For example, we noted with interest that under the new PubPub Platform ‘a Community is no longer tethered to a single website’. Therefore, would there be scope for an umbrella agreement with Copim, whereby Knowledge Futures hosts a Copim Community that acts as a home for small institutions or initiatives that might otherwise be in danger of losing their place on PubPub?
Could Knowledge Futures share a timeline for making their self-hosting documentation, technical specifications, and instructions available to the public? An awareness of when this information will be available and what deployment options will be supported would provide communities valuable lead time to be able to prepare for further work that might be required on their respective ends to implement the technical requirements involved.
Our understanding is that PubPub’s current offering is tied to the Google-owned Firebase database. Will the future, self-hostable PubPub Platform retain that Firebase dependency while allowing others to use their own version of Firebase (which might be a first step towards a self-hostable MVP that others could build upon)? Related to that, are Knowledge Futures considering any open source database alternatives for their new offering? Is Supabase being considered as one of those options?
In their announcement Knowledge Futures state that they will provide ‘pro-bono services to underrepresented communities on PubPub Platform’. Is there a mechanism for communities to confirm that they will be eligible for help? (The sooner this reassurance is available the better, as it will allow groups to plan accordingly.)
Knowledge Futures’ previous membership fees were tiered, allowing groups of all budgets to support PubPub as members. Meanwhile, the new annual hosting fees appear to be fixed at 3500 USD. We would appreciate further clarification on whether these hosting fees will be/could be tiered rather than fixed, to allow smaller communities to support Knowledge Futures.
Are there plans to introduce some form of community governance at Knowledge Futures? Before users invest time, money and resources in (re-)establishing their communities on PubPub Platform, how can they be reassured that they won’t be impacted by future unexpected changes?
We look forward to attending the Knowledge Futures Community Call (13 August) to learn more about PubPub’s future.
We would also be interested to hear the views of our broader communities. You are warmly invited to add your comments to this Pub, or send us an email at [email protected].
Header photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
