The Case for PubPub – Open Access Books Network

"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...."