The first 8 things to do when starting your journal account on Scholastica

1. Create a personal Scholastica login

Creating a personal account allows you to login and access

1. Create your journal account

Creating a journal account only takes a few minutes. The process is the same whether you're creating a brand new journal or registering an existing journal. Learn more about creating a journal account in our Editor Guide.

Adding a link to your journal's profile on Scholastica will help authors quickly find where to submit papers right from your journal's external website. You may need to contact your institution's IT staff.

3. Set your configuration options

You can easily customize Scholastica to suit your journal (e.g. blindness setting, email preferences, etc). To adjust your settings click My Journals > Settings > Journal Settings >Configuration Options.

4. Customize your reviewer form

You may customize the feedback form which is sent to reviewers. For example, you may add and remove questions, reorder questions, and more. Learn more about customizing your reviewer form.

5. Add editors

Editors assist in managing your journal. They have many of the same privileges as journal admin users, such as accessing manuscripts and inviting reviewers.

Editors cannot manage or change a journal's payment information or grant editorial privileges to other users. Only journal admin users can make these changes.

  • From your Dashboard, click My Journals.
    • Click the Settings tab
    • Click the Manage Editors tab from the drop down. (Here you can search and sort existing editors.)
    • Click Invite New Editor.

Invite editors
  • Enter the editor's email address in the To field.
  • Enter a message inviting them to become an editor of your journal.
  • Click Send Invitation.
  • You'll be taken back to your Manage Editors page.
    • The editor you've invited is added to the list of Pending, revoked, declined, etc. editors.
    • Their Status will be "Pending" until they accept or decline the invitation.

6. Add your existing manuscripts to Scholastica

When migrating from a previous system, it can be helpful to import manuscripts which are currently being reviewed.
NOTE: If you have many manuscripts that are in the middle of being processed on your old system, we recommend finishing that process in your old system and just accepting all new submissions on Scholastica. 

Scholastica allows editors to submit manuscripts on behalf of authors (i.e. manual submission) at no charge. You can use this feature to easily import manuscripts from your previous system. Learn more about uploading existing manuscripts.

Note you have the option to not send the author a confirmation email. This is helpful when a journal begins using Scholastica and wants to upload in-progress manuscripts but does not want the author to get an submission confirmation email potentially months after originally submitting the manuscript.

7. Invite reviewers

After uploading any in-progress manuscripts, you can invite reviewers to use Scholastica to submit their reviews. The benefit of asking reviewers to submit via Scholastica, rather than by email or your old system, is that you will immediately begin creating your database of reviewers, producing reviewer analytics, and tracking review deadlines.

To invite reviewers for a manuscript:

  • Visit the individual manuscript page
  • Go to the "Reviewers" section
  • Click "Invite a reviewer"
  • Click the "Invite by email" button
  • Use an existing email template, or write a new letter now (see more below)
  • Set the review due date
  • Press the "Send Invitation" button

At this point, you may want to create a reviewer invitation email template for any in-progress manuscripts that you just uploaded into Scholastica. An example template is:

Dear REVIEWER NAME,

We at the Scholastica Example Journal have begun using Scholastica to manage our manuscripts and reviews in order to improve our overall review process.

As part of this transition, we are asking all of our reviewers to submit their reviews through Scholastica. This is very easy to do: you will simply click the link at the bottom of this email, where you will be prompted to create an individual account on Scholastica – this usually takes less than a minute. You will confirm your email address, and then you are done!

You can then submit your review for {{MANUSCRIPT_TITLE}} by simply logging into your Scholastica account at any time.

Thank you!

8. Set up your decision email templates

Scholastica includes fully customizable decision email templates, including merge tags to insert dynamic variables such as {{MANUSCRIPT_NAME}} or {{AUTHOR_FULL_NAME}}.

Many journals save decision email templates for their most common decisions, such as "Desk Reject" and "Revise and Resubmit", or for particular situations such as "Accept (pending revisions)" or "Reject (not enough reviewers)".

To edit your journal's decision templates, go to any under-review manuscript, click the "Make a Decision" button, and then click the "Edit" link next to any of the decision templates.

To learn more about being an editor, check out our Editor Guide.