PubPub folk here - our landing page is pretty much 6 months past its shelf life. A rework that helps people find relevant communities is in the pipeline. In the meantime - we have a simple Explore page[1]. Some of my favorite communities are the newly launched Harvard Data Science Review[2], The Journal of Design and Science[3], _Cursor[4], and the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law and Policy[5].
We're also encouraged by a handful of communities that are experimenting with new formats of pre-publication review and training such as: Collective Wisdom[6], EFPT Psychotherapy Guidebook[7], and Data Feminism[8].
At a more meta-level, the challenge here is that this ecosystem is overwhelmingly complex. The business-models, culture, and technical infrastructure are all unhealthy and self-reinforcing. There's no single platform that can fix this - it needs a political campaign in parallel with a social movement in parallel with some really good tech infrastructure. The US healthcare challenge is a good parallel in a lot of ways. Both are going to need new economic and governance models. At the risk of straying too far from the original question, PubPub's parent - the Knowledge Futures Group[9] - is working to push on all of these fronts. Feel free to reach out if this is the kind of thing you care about!
PubPub | Full-Stack Web Developer | Cambridge, MA | Full-time Onsite | https://www.pubpub.org
We're building an open-source publishing platform for collaborative scientific (and other) documents.
Started as an MIT Media Lab project, PubPub is being put into production pipelines in close collaboration with the MIT Press. You'll work from the MIT Press and MIT Media Lab offices with the current team of 3-5. As a small team, you will play a critical role in the design and development of the product going forward.
Requirements: Javascript, React, Node, and open source community management experience. 3+ years web dev experience. Frontend design experience (Sketch, or similar).
Great question, and one that certainly doesn't have a straightforward or trivial answer. It's definitely more of a social challenge than a technical one - making publishing free/open won't do anything to fix incentives on its own.
My hunch is that change to this system will come from the outside. It's too risky of a career decision for a tenure-track professor to start publishing on PubPub (or any open/new system). But, there are lots of people who aren't playing that game. Lots of people who are doing science outside of academia, at a corporate R&D position, or for the sake of education, etc.
The most important step is to show that open publishing works. If we can work with these early adopters and show that conversations are more rich, or results more reproducible, we can start to go to universities and grant agencies and advocate for them to require open publishing. The first day that a university hires a professor or an agency rewards a grant based on the history of openly published work, will be a turning point. I hope it will be similar to the first time a software dev was hired for their Github profile, rather than their CS degree.
Today, software companies hire on experience. A university degree can show that, but so can major contributions to an open-source project. I hope science can become the same. Whether you're a PhD out of a great program, or an high-school drop out that has committed her life to rigorous experimentation, your demonstrated experience should be what you're hired on, not the list of journals that have found it in their interest (many of them are for-profit) to include your work.
We're keen on getting good offline support added, but (as you point out) there's still a lot to be done on the web side of things. We're pushing out some big updates that hopefully clarify the project and how to use it in a couple weeks.
Welcome to ideas on what good offline support would look like, or PRs if anyone wants to take a stab at it.
Our goal is for PubPub to be a public utility for scientific communication. It'll be non-profit and open source for as long as it lives (still a grad student project at the moment...) and free for anyone to publish whatever they like. I don't think we're nearly smart enough to know exactly what that looks like, so please do feel free to contribute ideas, code, or inspiration into what a public tool for science communication should be (this comments page is already wonderful in that regard).
PubPub here. We need cleaner documentation on this - apologies for the lack of clarity.
PubPub journals (like JoDS) are no longer the publisher, but rather the curator. So, the key steps are:
1) Anybody can write and publish a document on PubPub.
2) Any document can be submitted to any journal.
3) Any journal can choose to feature a document (regardless of whether it was submitted or not).
4) Documents can be featured in unlimited journals.
So, to answer your question: yes - anybody can (publish on PubPub and then) submit to JoDS.
We're also encouraged by a handful of communities that are experimenting with new formats of pre-publication review and training such as: Collective Wisdom[6], EFPT Psychotherapy Guidebook[7], and Data Feminism[8].
At a more meta-level, the challenge here is that this ecosystem is overwhelmingly complex. The business-models, culture, and technical infrastructure are all unhealthy and self-reinforcing. There's no single platform that can fix this - it needs a political campaign in parallel with a social movement in parallel with some really good tech infrastructure. The US healthcare challenge is a good parallel in a lot of ways. Both are going to need new economic and governance models. At the risk of straying too far from the original question, PubPub's parent - the Knowledge Futures Group[9] - is working to push on all of these fronts. Feel free to reach out if this is the kind of thing you care about!
[1] https://www.pubpub.org/explore
[2] https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu
[3] https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu
[4] https://cursor.pubpub.org
[5] https://stanford-jblp.pubpub.org
[6] https://wip.mitpress.mit.edu/collectivewisdom
[7] https://epg.pubpub.org
[8] https://bookbook.pubpub.org/data-feminism
[9] https://kfg.mit.edu