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Hi all,

Last month, our team had the opportunity to get together in one place. We took a week (and many precautions) to work in person, connect, and plan for all that's to come in 2022 and beyond. In fact many members of the KFG team met for the very first time!

At the end of those few days we felt invigorated with a clarified focus to support knowledge communities by helping them engage committed members and produce work that helps others make sense of the world. You'll see the importance of "usefulness" as an impact metric of its own shine through in many of this month's highlights — from a Press turning books into "open-ended tools"; to author Janneke Adema proposing we think of books as living, collaborative projects; to a new framework for machine-readable context about preprint evaluation.

Thanks for reading,

—Your PubPub Team 

Community Highlights

Open Press TiU — "the scholarly-led academic Open Access publishing house for Tilburg University and beyond" — launched an interactive repository for an dynamic educational experience, where books become open-ended tools. Learn more about them and engage with their first book.

Recently, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), eLife/Sciety, EMBO, and the Knowledge Futures Group announced they will pilot the new DocMaps framework, which will provide machine-readable data and context about how community groups and peer review platforms are evaluating preprints. This will facilitate the exchange, aggregation, and publication of peer reviews within a distributed, interoperable infrastructure. Learn more about it here.

Open Knowledge Institutions was first drafted as a Book Sprint, then it went through open peer review on PubPub before its authors published a final OA version as a monograph with the MIT Press. Last month some of the authors and members of the Book Sprints and PubPub teams met to discuss this process further. Watch the video of the webinar here.

Open Future is a think tank that develops new approaches to an open internet that maximise societal benefits of shared data, knowledge and culture. They recently launched a PubPub community comprising a selection of their publications with a special focus on texts that are still evolving and need feedback.

In Living Books (MIT Press), author Janneke Adema, proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project—not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. You can read the full text now on PubPub. 

Tool Tip

Last month, PubPub's Editorial Manager, Dawit Tegbaru, participated in a conversation about content formats. Watch the conversation to learn more about how our observations about what all of you do on the platform inform how we support you and build PubPub along with insights from the other participants: Hannah Heckner (Silverchair), Rebekah Stacha (Society of Petroleum Engineers), and Todd Carpenter (NISO). 

This Month’s Community Numbers

(September 1 – October 1, 2021)

What We’re Reading

Endnote

[1]  Open Publishing Fest 

Open Publishing Fest is a decentralized public event that brings together communities supporting open source software, open content, and open publishing models. Held over two weeks in November this year, Open Publishing Fest will feature discussions, demos, and performances that showcase our paths toward a more open world. We're looking forward to attending and hope you'll consider joining and/or proposing an event!