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April Product Update

Some exciting behind-the-scenes improvements, and a peak at what's coming next: two of our most-requested features!
Published onMay 04, 2021
April Product Update
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01. Dashboard overview design refresh

We’ve been working to improve the performance of the Dashboard for Communities with many hundreds or thousands of Pubs (—brief interjection to celebrate 🎉 that there are Communities with that much content on PubPub these days!—). In the process, we’ve given the Community and Collection overviews a bit of a design refresh, which will go live on Monday, May 3rd. The search functionality should make it easier to find the Pub you’re looking for, even when it’s nested in a Collection. And the new Quick Actions and Recently Viewed sections should make it easier for you to perform common tasks or to pick up where you left off.

02. Alphabetized citation lists

When in-text citations use the author’s last name, readers commonly expect to find a list of citations alphabetized by those last names at the end of the document. Now, PubPub will handle this correctly when you choose Author or Author-Year options under Pub Settings > Inline Citation Style.

03. Text Alignment

PubPub now support center and right-aligned text! We hope this will help you add a bit of expressiveness to your prose, or maybe make bake sale flyers.

It’s also useful when laying out tables:

Table with center-aligned items

04. Footer logo links

Communities can now add custom links to their footer logos. This oft-requested feature allows organizations operating PubPub sites another way to, say, link back to homepages outside of their community. You can find this field in your Community Settings.

05. Improved image quality

Images across PubPub, including inline in Pubs and Pages, and in places like Community and Pub Headers, will now display at higher resolutions, particularly on larger and denser (aka retina) screens. These improvements have already taken place, require no action on your part, and should have minimal impact on page load times. They are the culmination of a number of different improvements behind the scenes, including to our image resizing tooling and the html we use to display images.

06. *ALL* the CC licenses

Any community can now choose between any CC license for their Pubs, making it easier to publish works with different license requirements. Communities who require a copyright license or other custom license are asked to get in touch to inquire about contributing via one of our paid plans.

07. We’re Hiring!

Come join our mission-driven, thoughtfully remote team and help us build better futures for academic publishing. This year, we’ll be building new submission and review tools, new ways for organizations to manage many Communities at once, more powerful discussion features, and more. Our next engineer will have a foundational role in bringing these to life for thousands of PubPub users and millions of readers. See the job description for more details.

08. What’s Next

We’ve spent the first quarter of the year doing some much-needed maintenance and catching up with some of our most active communities’ scaling needs. Now that we’re closing that work, we’ll be turning to building some new systems to power better Community Publishing!

Activity and Notifications. While designing these features, we’ve tried to balance giving Communities the information they need to understand what’s happening with the desire to not build features that make PubPub “addictive,” or sticky. Thus, we’re going to be starting with simple views of activity and the ability to receive regular email digests of activity, and expand from there. To learn more about our plans and contribute your thoughts, you can visit our Activity and Notifications discussion thread.

Editorial Management. We’re super excited to build out PubPub’s editorial management features to support as many types of Community Publishing processes as possible — from traditional journal review processes, to preprint server submissions, to overlay review of preprints, and beyond. To do this, we’re asking for your help defining what you’d like to see in these features. If you have thoughts or ideas, please feel free to add to the discussion thread on the topic, to which many have already helpfully contributed.


What do you think of these new features? Have ideas, feedback, and/or questions? Talk to us in our new Forum, Twitter (@pubpub), or via [email protected]!

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