Open knowledge amid a pandemic & new supportive features
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PubPub newsletter subscribers received this newsletter on April 7, 2020. You can view it here on Mailchimp. Consider subscribing to our monthly newsletters for updates about the platform, news from our communities, and things we’re thinking about.
Hello Friends,
Another newsletter marks another month—and what a month this has been. We hope you're well and staying safe as the world navigates its way through the coronavirus pandemic. Our team is working harder than ever to support new COVID-19-related publications on the site while pushing out new features. We're also encouraged by the international gestures of community and collaboration toward solving this problem, and the conversations the pandemic has prompted about the importance of open knowledge and infrastructure in good times and in bad. You'll see these themes across many of the spotlights below. Thank you for making PubPub a space where we personally find comfort and inspiration.
Warmly, Your PubPub team
1000+ Communities!
Last month, PubPub surpassed 1,000 communities. Thank you to those who have created and nurtured spaces with us—and to those of you who are just see what this thing is all about. Our continued and quickening growth tells us we're doing something right, even if there's plenty of work left to be done to improve PubPub. Which brings us to...
New Tools Coming Soon
Three big, exciting new features are coming soon. If you’re interested in helping us test and providing feedback, please reply to this email and let us know.
1. Community Dashboard One of the biggest areas of improvement you’ve asked us to focus on is content management. So we set out to provide more tools for managing the entire collaborative publishing lifecycle. This new Dashboard is just the start, but we think you’ll find it to be a big leap forward.
2. Pub Header Because the Dashboard largely replaces Pub settings, we've made significant updates to the Pub header that make it easier to implement common changes to the Pub without leaving the page. It also freshens up the design and includes a new suite of customization options that make it easier to brand your Pubs. We're super excited to see what you do with it!
3. Granular Permissions
The Dashboard naturally groups content at different scopes: Community-wide, Collections, and Pubs. With this update, we've included the ability to set granular permissions at every scope. So, for example, you can now add Members at the Community level who can read, but not edit, anything in your Community. Or, you can give someone full management access to just one Collection. In addition to making it far easier to understand permissions, we're excited to see how this unlocks opportunities to use PubPub for greater collaboration.
We're hiring!
Want to help build a better future for academic publishing? We're looking for a software engineer to work with us in supporting the needs of our growing community of—have you heard?—1,000+ journals, books, blogs, and more. Here are more details. Apply and/or share!
Cursor_ Special Issue: Viral
One of our earliest communities, Cursor_ , a journal out of the University of Heidelberg's Faculty of Theology, has published a special issue on COVID-19 called "Viral." We're envious of you German speakers who get to settle into this one.
The MIT Press on COVID-19
In response to the increased need for digital content and distance learning, the MIT Press is making a selection of titles on pandemics, epidemiology, and related topics freely available for the foreseeable future. New titles are becoming available on a rolling basis, but you can read the first handful now.
The Commonplace
The Knowledge Futures Group is launching its own publication on PubPub called The Commonplace. It is a space to discuss the digital infrastructure and policies needed to distribute, constellate, and amplify knowledge for the public good. Many from our own team and mission-aligned partners (and, we hope, some of you!) will be contributing to it. Read more about The Commonplace's mission and scope here.
Community Spotlight: Graduate Journal of Food Studies
Few things make us happier than running into a great community on PubPub. So, we were excited to explore the Graduate Journal of Food Studies this month. It's a beautifully executed and interesting space. We suggest you take a look.
Do you have community news? Please share it with us at hello@pubpub.org for inclusion in our next newsletter!
ASAPbio and the Knowledge Futures Group teamed up to facilitate a discussion about new ways of sharing scientific information amidst the coronavirus pandemic, via preprints, rapid peer review, and more. Watch the full video of the conversation and keep an eye out for the edited transcript, coming soon in The Commonplace.
Rapid sharing of COVID-19 research
A new guide to getting started
In an effort to offer more support materials for using PubPub, we published our first guide to getting started on the platform. The article walks you through the first steps of community creation and basic settings. Watch for more in the. "Resources" section of our Notes community.
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