Thank you to everyone who has applied. We are no longer accepting applications for this role.1

Abstract

The Knowledge Futures Group is hiring an Editorial Manager to help curate and produce content for two of its products, PubPub2, a collaborative and open publishing tool for the academic web, and Commonplace, a new publication of the KFG. We’re looking for someone with strong writing and editorial skills, knowledge of academic publishing, and interest in experimenting with new publishing practices. You’ll get to work directly with authors and editors, and use those experiences to experiment and contribute to the KFG’s editorial plans and PubPub’s roadmap. We will pay you competitively, let you work from wherever you want, and take you and your ideas seriously. Join us!

About the Knowledge Futures Group

The Knowledge Futures Group, founded as a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, is a nonprofit organization that builds technology for the production, curation, and preservation of knowledge in service of the public good.

About PubPub & The Commonplace

PubPub is an open-source publishing tool used by over 500 journals, conferences, books, and other diverse types of communities. At its heart, it features a collaborative document editor with strong support for academic standards. Layered on top are features for discussion and organization. In the works are powerful tools for editorial review and enabling small and large communities to thrive on PubPub. Underlying all of this is a belief that better publishing tools can help researchers focus on doing the best work of their lives, rather than adapting their work to the whims of rent-seekers and gatekeepers.

We use PubPub to host our house publication, The Commonplace, a space where people discuss the digital infrastructure and policies needed to distribute, constellate, and amplify knowledge for the public good.

About The Role

• Lead production and/or establishment of select books and journals with PubPub publishing communities.

• Work directly with community admins (editors, authors, researchers, publishers, conference organizers) to advise on publication practices and options on PubPub, including conducting training sessions.

• Maintain our team editorial calendar with an eye to strategic priorities and team bandwidth.

• Listen to feedback from users and communicate it to our product and design teams to inform platform roadmap.

• Experiment with and push the boundaries of PubPub to help create models and ideas for users and our team.

• Help write user and best-practices guides to improve onboarding and new user experience.

• Participate in demos for potential new partners.

• Represent PubPub at industry conferences.

About You

• You have some experience in scholarly communications, have a sense of the challenges in the field, and have thoughts on how to bring about positive change.

• You have some experience establishing and running a daily publishing workflow at a digital publication.

• You’re always learning and seek to bring in different and diverse perspectives.

• You don’t want to just maintain or improve upon existing publishing models, but instead want to think of and implement new pathways for effective knowledge exchange.

• You know the difference between an em and en dash, and have an opinion on the oxford comma.

• You’re eager to express PubPub’s (and your own) editorial values both through the work you do and your own writing about them.

• You want to work on a team that respects your ideas about the publication process and models that improve scholarship, not just capitalize on it.

• You want breathing room to experiment, be thoughtful, and get things right, but without losing sight of an active user base and longer-term goals.

Working With Us

• Work with a distributed team: while our team started out of Cambridge, MA, the majority of the PubPub team works from elsewhere and from home.

• Enjoy industry-standard perks: unlimited PTO with a yearly minimum, your own computer of choice, and a competitive benefits package.

• Contribute to our larger mission at the Knowledge Futures Group: we’re building a future where the infrastructure to create and access knowledge is controlled by people who serve the public interest, starting with core projects like PubPub and The Underlay. As a KFG team member, you’ll be able to contribute to those efforts as well.

Apply

If you’re interested, please send us an email with a resume or CV and brief cover letter and we’ll be in touch!

We welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds with diverse skillsets. If you have significant personal experience or engagement with low-income communities, international communities, or fields and languages that are underrepresented in academia, scholarly publishing, or open data, we strongly encourage you to apply. This job description is intended to be a guidepost, not a checklist. If you feel like you could do a great job in this role, even if you don’t exactly meet every qualification, please consider applying.

Eligibility

You must be legally authorized to work in the United States to apply for this role.