Everything is open-sourced, and we've tried to document as much as possible to make it easy for people to host their own instances! Alternatively, you can just create arbitrarily many drafts without publishing any of them.
The fact that it is open source is a major positive point. I suppose you have heard of SJS [1] which in a way is very close to what PubPub is, except I do not believe in SJS because of it being closed source: it is way too unsafe for a scientific community to take the risk of adopting such a media for a new journal or a conference as the platform is not open and there is a risk of Elsevier buying it to shut it down or closing it even more, for instance.
Yup. I'm still stung by Mendeley's sale to Elsevier.
– PubPub doesn't seem to have math support, is that right? I think that should be a very high priority.
– LaTeX import is also really important (but this supposes that math is supported), is that on the roadmap?
– Related question: is there a way to work offline in my usual text editor and collaborate with my usual tools (git, svn, whatever) and then import my paper in PubPub?
We're keen on getting good offline support added, but (as you point out) there's still a lot to be done on the web side of things. We're pushing out some big updates that hopefully clarify the project and how to use it in a couple weeks.
Welcome to ideas on what good offline support would look like, or PRs if anyone wants to take a stab at it.
Our goal is for PubPub to be a public utility for scientific communication. It'll be non-profit and open source for as long as it lives (still a grad student project at the moment...) and free for anyone to publish whatever they like. I don't think we're nearly smart enough to know exactly what that looks like, so please do feel free to contribute ideas, code, or inspiration into what a public tool for science communication should be (this comments page is already wonderful in that regard).
If anyone is serious and passionate about helping out, we're hiring!
But I really hope I can contribute as a user in the future :).