What Knowledge Futures Group does

Knowledge Futures Group is a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2018 as a partnership between the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Press. It builds open-source knowledge-publishing infrastructure, primarily PubPub (a turn-key academic publication site builder) and PubPub Platform (a highly customizable, low-level full-stack knowledge infrastructure). PubPub Platform v7 is built on a hub-and-spoke architecture with no proprietary dependencies, supports configurable PubTypes (custom content schemas), Workflows composed of Stages and modular Actions, nested Pub relationships, and format-agnostic outputs (PDF, ePub, web, JSON, LaTeX). The platform runs as a Docker swarm stack enabling self-hosting on commodity infrastructure (AWS, DigitalOcean, Cloud68, Render, Fly, Heroku), and a centralized authentication system (auth.knowledgefutures.org) supports OAuth via GitHub and ORCID plus institutional SSO.

The organization serves a diversified set of users across academic and research institutions, university and research libraries, nonprofit/open-access publishers, research communities, and cultural institutions, with thousands of communities actively using PubPub. Revenue is generated through a mixed model: foundation grants from major funders (Sloan, Gates, Knight, MacArthur, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Siegel, Aphorism, Astera), annual PubPub Platform hosting fees of $3,500 per year, larger custom development services contracts ranging from $35,000 to $300,000, institutional memberships under the PubPub Sustainability Fund, individual donations, and technology-investment partnerships such as the Crossref $258,000 DOI-management investment. Go-to-market combines community-led adoption with selective enterprise partnerships for mission-aligned organizations seeking semi-custom knowledge infrastructure.

Knowledge Futures underwent a significant funding shock in June 2025 when a critical funder withdrew support, prompting layoffs, a wind-down of hosted PubPub Platform service, and an 18-month extension of PubPub Legacy to December 31, 2026. A January-April 2026 infrastructure transition cut server costs by more than 98.6% (less than 1% of previous setup) via Fastly/Cloudflare/Sentry nonprofit programs and in-database Postgres search, enabling a sustainable path forward. Co-founder Travis Rich returned as Executive Director in March 2026, with Jeff Pooley joining the Board, and the organization is now pursuing partnerships (notably with Crossref) while stewarding PubPub and PubPub Platform as two independent product paths.

Name

Knowledge Futures Group

Legal name

Knowledge Futures, Inc.

Website

https://knowledgefutures.org

Company type

Private

Founded year

2018

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Knowledge Futures Group is a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit that builds PubPub and PubPub Platform, open-source knowledge-publishing infrastructure used by thousands of academic, library, research, and cultural-institution communities worldwide.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Open-source Academic Publishing Infrastructure

NAICS

Web Search Portals, Libraries, Archives, and Other Information Services (519), Libraries and Archives (51921), Web Search Portals and All Other Information Services (51929), Web Search Portals and All Other Information Services (519290)

SIC

Miscellaneous Publishing (2741), Books: Publishing Or Publishing & Printing (2731)

akta.pro primary industry

Digital Archives, Libraries & Institutional Access Platforms (MPAJAMAJ)

akta.pro secondary industries

OER Repositories, Discovery & Metadata Services (EDAGAJAL), Digital Library & Electronic Resources Operations (e-Resources, Repositories, Licensing) (EDAEAGAF), Libraries, Archives & Special Collections (BPAGAHAF)

Keywords

• Open-source publishing infrastructure
• Academic publishing platform
• Scholarly publishing software
• Knowledge management platform
• Nonprofit publishing technology

Headquarters

HQ city

Cambridge

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Operations, Marketing or Sales

Revenue model

1. PubPub Hosting Fees: Annual hosting fee for PubPub Platform, offering equivalent experience to Legacy with migration support and documentation access. Core revenue stream supporting organizational sustainability.
2. Custom Development Services: Larger-scale services contracts for custom platform implementations, ranging from $35K to $300K, expanding capabilities for each partner.
3. Foundation Grants: Grant funding from foundations including Sloan Foundation, Gates Foundation, Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and others supporting open infrastructure development.
4. PubPub Sustainability Fund: Donations to sustain PubPub server costs indefinitely. Goal of $300,000 to cover core infrastructure for foreseeable future.
5. Institutional Membership: Organizations can participate in platform stewardship and receive member-only updates through annual contributions.
6. Crossref Partnership: Crossref investment of $258K to explore high-volume DOI management models for open research infrastructure.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion3 records

Distribution channels5 records

Marketing channels8 records

Core offering

Knowledge Futures Group builds and maintains open-source knowledge-publishing infrastructure used by academic, library, museum, and nonprofit communities. Its core offerings are PubPub, a full-stack turn-key academic publication site builder for journals, books, reports, preprints, and datasets, and PubPub Platform, a customizable low-level infrastructure for creating bespoke Knowledge Applications with custom content types, workflows, and output formats. The organization supplements these products with custom Knowledge Application development services, the PubPub Sustainability Fund, Institutional Membership, and developer APIs.

Product overview

Knowledge Futures offers a unified product portfolio centered around PubPub, an open-source academic publishing platform, and PubPub Platform, the next-generation customizable infrastructure for building bespoke knowledge applications. PubPub serves as the turn-key site builder for communities to publish journals, books, reports, and more, while PubPub Platform provides the low-level, highly customizable foundation for partners requiring custom PubTypes, flexible workflows, and programmable Actions. The PubPub Sustainability Fund supports ongoing operations. The portfolio also includes Knowledge Applications built on Platform (such as preprint review systems and repositories), the PubPub Legacy Knowledge Application (Legacy features replicated on Platform), and a full API for developer integrations. PubPub Legacy continues to be supported through December 31, 2026.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

• PubPub: Open-source publishing platform that helps communities share and steward knowledge. It is a full-stack, turn-key academic publication site builder.
• PubPub Platform

Products and services

• PubPub Full-stack, turn-key academic publication site builder that allows communities to publish journals, books, reports, preprint servers, conference proceedings, and dataset collections. Used by thousands of academic and research communities for producing, curating, and publishing knowledge.
• PubPub Platform Open-source, highly customizable, low-level infrastructure for building bespoke publication toolchains. Allows communities to create Knowledge Applications with custom Pub Types, flexible workflows, programmable Actions, and design flexibility. Built with no proprietary dependencies for easy self-hosting via Docker on commodity infrastructure (AWS, DigitalOcean, Cloud68, Render, Fly, Heroku).
• PubPub Platform Hosting Annual hosted subscription to PubPub Platform at $3,500 per year, including migration support from PubPub Legacy, forum-based support, and access to documentation. Core revenue stream supporting organizational sustainability.
• Custom Knowledge Application Development Custom platform development services on PubPub Platform, with services contracts ranging from approximately $35,000 to $300,000, expanding capabilities for each partner. Targets mission-aligned organizations seeking semi-custom, full-stack knowledge infrastructure.
• PubPub Platform PubTypes Custom content type definitions backed by JSON schemas for consistent metadata and standards compliance. Communities specify what kinds of Pubs they work with (journal articles, book chapters, reports, datasets) and their metadata and content requirements.
• PubPub Platform Workflows Configurable workflow stages (Stages) ordered via drag-and-drop interface and assigned modular Actions (applets) that automate tasks like DOI assignment, email notifications, and reviewer invitations. Includes an Overlay Review system for evaluating works posted elsewhere (e.g., preprints).
• PubPub Sustainability Fund Donation fund ensuring PubPub remains online, accessible, and reliable for the communities that depend on it. Goal of $300,000 to cover core server and technical costs indefinitely. Includes Institutional Membership option for organizations.
• PubPub API Full content and workflow API allowing technical teams to build their own services and integrations on top of PubPub Platform. Authentication uses Bearer tokens, with existing tokens to be re-minted in account settings.

Quantifiable outcome

• Infrastructure costs reduced to less than 1% of previous setup (98.6% server cost reduction)
• +3 more outcomes

Named customers10 records

Segments5 records

Ideal customer profiles5 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration2 records

Feature7 records

Partnerships

13 partnerships are on record, tiered flagship, core and major.

• CrossrefflagshipStrategic or Co-development Partner · 8 June 2026Crossref investing $258K to partner with Knowledge Futures exploring high-volume, high-granularity DOI management models for open research infrastructure. Collaboration aims to test limits of DOI registration at scale.
• Earth BioGenome ProjectcoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2024Collaboration to build Universal Genome Note Repository for affordable open publication of genome notes. Supported by Wellcome Sanger Institute and Arizona State University.
• Vanderbilt UniversitycoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2024Collaboration on workflows for media-rich publications, exploring journal infrastructure where the medium serves the message. Working with Vanderbilt Libraries.
• Arcadia SciencecoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2024Collaboration on radical rapid publishing project exploring new modes of presentation and organization for research discovery and collaborative purposes.
• Astera InstitutecoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2024Collaboration on archiving with incremental structuring project, exploring tooling for organizations to collect, organize, and present research outputs.
• Danny Hillis and SJ KleincoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2024Collaborators on structured review project, exploring forms of peer review that extract and structure claims and concepts from scientific publications into publishable knowledge graphs.
• FastlycoreTechnology or Integration · 1 January 2024Nonprofit program providing free CDN and caching, and asset delivery. Fastly's infrastructure replaced AWS CloudFormation stack (Lambda, CloudFront, EC2), enabling major architectural changes.
• CloudflarecoreTechnology or Integration · 1 January 2024Nonprofit program providing free DNS, security, and caching services. Enabled moving custom-domain management off Heroku and to cheaper Docker-based deployments.
• Arizona State UniversitymajorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2024Supporting Earth BioGenome Project collaboration with Knowledge Futures on Universal Genome Note Repository.
• MIT PresscoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2018Founding partner, co-founding Knowledge Futures in 2018 as a partnership between MIT Media Lab and MIT Press. Ongoing institutional supporter through MIT Libraries.
• MIT Media LabcoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2018Founding partner, co-founding Knowledge Futures in 2018. Original home for PubPub development.
• COPIMmajorStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2018Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications - supporter and collaborator in open infrastructure ecosystem.
• MIT LibrariescoreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2018Institutional supporter, founding partner through MIT affiliation. Early supporter of PubPub Sustainability Fund.

Scale indicators9 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• Open Journal Systems (PKP): Public Knowledge Project's flagship open-source journal publishing and management system, widely used by academic libraries. Most directly comparable to PubPub as a community-adopted, open-source journal/publication platform serving scholarly publishing.
• Coko (Coko Foundation): Open-source, customizable scholarly publishing infrastructure organization. Highly comparable to Knowledge Futures in providing modular, open-source tooling for building bespoke publication workflows rather than monolithic SaaS platforms.
• Hypothesis: Nonprofit open-source annotation and discussion layer for scholarly content; comparable as a nonprofit-built open infrastructure layer for scholarly communication.
• Scholastica: Open-access journal hosting and peer-review management platform serving academic publishers. Comparable as a publishing-platform provider targeting scholarly journals, with a related but more SaaS-centric business model.
• Janeway (Open Library of Humanities platform): Open-source journal publishing platform built by and for the Open Library of Humanities; directly comparable open-source publishing infrastructure used in scholarly communications.
• Pensoft: Open-access scientific publishing company with publishing platforms (ARPHA) and journals. Comparable as a technology-driven open-access publisher delivering publishing infrastructure and services to scholarly communities.
• Dryad: Nonprofit open data publishing platform for research data. Comparable as a nonprofit-built open publishing/archival infrastructure serving scholarly communities.
• Overleaf: Cloud-based collaborative LaTeX writing/publishing tool widely adopted by academics. Comparable as open publishing infrastructure for scholarly content with strong community usage.

Broad incumbents

• Atypon Literatum: Commercial scholarly publishing platform serving major publishers and societies. Comparable as publishing-infrastructure provider but operates commercially and at much larger scale, contrasting with KF's nonprofit/open-source model.
• eLife: Major open-access journal and platform within the broader scholarly publishing ecosystem. Comparable as an open-access scholarly publishing initiative touching publishing infrastructure, though primarily a journal rather than infrastructure provider.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks7 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• GitHubgithub.com/knowledgefutures
• Xx.com/kfutures

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles10 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds1 record

Investors1 record

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Knowledge Futures Group