PUBLISH and SUBSCRIBE are SPECIFICALLY for dealing with RAW data that is in a format not "natively" supported by Do-more (including swapped Modbus Register words, BCD format, et. al.).
PUBLISH is when you need to WRITE (Publish) Do-more data OUT to another PLC/Device.
SUBSCIRBE is when you need to READ (Subscribe) data from another PLC/Device to Do-more.
Neither of these actually do the transaction, but just format the data to its desired format so that it can be written/read to the remote device in ITS format. If you are familiar with the 7 Layer OSI Communications Model, this would fall under "Layer 6 - Presentation Layer".
Most of the time, these are not needed, because most protocols handle these consistently. However, (for example) Modbus does NOT specify an Endian-ness when dealing with DWORDs or REALs (i.e. WORD order). This is a some-what common issue with some Modbus devices.