Open Infrastructure: Knowledge Futures Announces a “Wind Down of Some Key Initiatives”

From a Knowledge Future:

In a difficult but necessary move, Knowledge Futures is initiating a wind-down of some key initiatives and entering a period of regrouping after a critical funder unexpectedly withdrew its support.

Despite making real progress toward long-term sustainability; meeting, and at times even surpassing, our development and revenue milestones; and receiving enthusiastic feedback from partners, we now face an unforeseen funding gap that requires us to take drastic, immediate action. To protect the communities that rely on us and uphold our values of collaboration, systemic outlook, and sustainability, we are activating our contingency plan: responsibly sunsetting PubPub Legacy, pausing our hosted Platform service, and reducing staff. As always, we are committed to doing right by our users and team, and to sharing openly what led to this point so others in the open infrastructure ecosystem can learn from it.

As part of this change, we have set aside funding to extend the end-of-life of PubPub Legacy for eighteen months, until December 31, 2026. We will also be finishing the self-service export tooling we’ve been working on and a long-term static archive of existing content. This will give Legacy users 18 months to continue publishing on Legacy while they transition to another platform of their choice or long-term static archiving. We will be reaching out to collaborators who have already signed Legacy-to-Platform migration contracts to refund them. We will be shutting down the centrally hosted version of Platform at the end of 2025 and assisting existing users in transitioning to self-hosted instances or other platforms of their choice. While we believe there is tremendous potential for the future of PubPub Platform as a next-generation open-source CMS, we do not believe it is responsible to continue offering it as a service until we have a sustainability plan in place. We will be having hard conversations with our partners about the impacts of these changes and encourage any PubPub user or KF collaborator to email hello@pubpub.org to discuss this news.

We had no choice but to immediately lay off many of our staff to ensure we have the funds to responsibly complete these transitions. The KF team comprises some of the best developers, designers, relationship managers, and non-profit operations professionals in the industry, and we recommend all of them, without reservation, to anyone in the academic publishing community (and beyond) who is hiring for these roles. Please email hello@pubpub.org to inquire about hiring our former staff.

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