PubPub Product Information and Latest Updates (2025)

PubPub

Maker

Back in college, @istravis, myself, and the rest of our roommates in our crazy 8-person dorm room at Boston University spent way too much time debating the problems with academic publishing, which tends to reward prestige and influence over quality of work, privileging well-funded (mostly white, mostly male) researchers at elite universities. I went into a career in media tech, and everyone else went off to get their PhDs, including Travis, who went to the MIT Media Lab and built what would become PubPub out of frustration with the publishing options available to him. Years later, Travis called me up and told me he was launching not just PubPub, but a new group called Knowledge Futures with @publicreations, @kjs1, the MIT Press, and the MIT Media Lab dedicated to making knowledge and knowledge creation accessible to all. He asked if I knew anyone who might want to work on the product, and, well, I couldn't resist. Since then, we've spun out into an independent non-profit, grown from an experimental tool used by a few hundred small communities to a platform that hosts 2,000+ journals, books, conference proceedings, blogs and more, including award-winning books and journals like Design Justice and the Harvard Data Science Review, and novel experiments like Rapid Reviews: COVID-19. I'm proud to say that through it all we've kept true to our roots. We're obsessed, first and foremost, with serving knowledge creators by drastically reducing barriers to entry and supporting new forms of publishing in the gaps left by existing models. We believe that the future of disseminating research looks a lot more like small communities publishing their own work on inexpensive open infrastructure than massive monopolistic conglomerates extracting 50+% margins from resource-constrained knowledge institutions. There's no particular reason we're hunting today, other than we realized we haven't been hunted yet. We'd love to answer your questions about the fascinating, rapidly evolving world of academic publishing and hear your thoughts on PubPub. Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention we're hiring.

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4yr ago

Oliver Ding

@istravis @publicreations @gabestein Great job! I read the JoDS in 2019. Since then, have been watching the development of the PubPub project for many years. It is nice to see it is part of the Knowledge Futures Group. Last year, I launch CALL (Creative Action Learning Lab) which aims to bridge the gap between academic theoretical knowledge and professional practice in real world. As a knowledge curator, I recently work on the Activity U project which focuses on the development of Activity Theory. As a knowledge maker, I am working on developing my own theoretical account: the Ecological Practice approach. This is CALL's website: https://medium.com/call4. The medium platform is pretty cool. However, I find it is not great for community knowledge developing. I plan to launch a new journal on PubPub.

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4yr ago

Gabriel Stein

PubPub

Maker

@oliverding That's awesome! Let us know if you need any help getting setup. help at pubpub dot org.

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4yr ago

Oliver Ding

@gabestein thanks.