Shifting publishing back to the place.
For a century, field stations have made research possible — then watched it leave. The work gets published elsewhere, and the station’s part in it disappears. iPlaces gives that research a home at the station itself: citable, permanent, and shared on the terms the local community sets.
17°29′S · 149°49′W
Standing together — individually and collectively.
Sovereignty rests with the station, not the network. Each station keeps its own name, its own place, its own community and its own decisions. Underneath, stations share one platform and one set of standards.
Gump South Pacific Research Station
Mo'orea, French Polynesia · University of California, Berkeley
The pilot instance. Publishing project records, course collections and conference proceedings, each with a registered DOI.
More stations are preparing to launch. Bringing a station on is a configuration, not a rebuild — and it doesn’t replace the networks a station already belongs to.
Talk to us about your stationReal work, citable, resolving today.
Published by Gump Station through iPlaces. Every entry carries a DOI registered with DataCite — not a link that rots when the grant ends.
Fetching the most recent publications…
The station already does this work. Now it counts.
iPlaces uses the roles and steps a journal already has — author, editor, reviewer — and maps them onto the people a station already has.
A project arrives at the station
A visiting investigator submits the thing they already have to write anyway — an application, a permit request, a sampling plan, a project description. It enters as a manuscript, not an email attachment.
The station decides who reviews it
The director assigns reviewers and watches progress on a dashboard. Stations set their own roles: scientific review, legal or permitting review, cultural review — whichever the place actually requires.
The station publishes it under its own name
Accepted records are published in the station's own branded journal and registered with DataCite. The record gets a DOI, and connects to the people, funders and institutions behind it through ORCID and ROR.
The record stays connected to the place
Local Contexts labels carry the community's terms with the record wherever it travels. Downstream papers and datasets point back to the station that made them possible.
Permanent by design
Every output gets a DOI that resolves for good — the same identifier infrastructure Crossref, ORCID and DataCite run on. Not a website that dies when the grant ends.
The community decides
Sensitive sites and Indigenous knowledge are published on the community’s terms — with Local Contexts labels, and access held to the level each station chooses, not opened by default.
Built once, inherited by the next
What one station builds — forms, workflows, templates, standards — the next one inherits. No station starts from zero, and none of it replaces the networks stations already belong to. This is an augmentation, not a competitor.
iPlaces isn’t a product, and it won’t be sold. It’s public-good infrastructure — built to be owned by its mission.
Publishing research where it happens does more than preserve it. It puts the station’s role back into the record — and shifts the account of science from something controlled only after the fieldwork leaves, to something the place itself can hold. That is infrastructure designed, on purpose, to resist the extractive patterns that have long carried knowledge out of places without giving anything back.
This didn’t start as a product. It started as a three-year study of twenty field stations, and the argument that came out of it. The platform is that argument, built — running today at one station, with more preparing to follow, and meant to keep working long after any one grant closes.