Publisher Guide

Overview

Scholastica is an all-in-one solution for open access journals. We're leading the way with new technology to help you lower publishing costs without sacrificing journal quality. Streamline peer review, publish professional-grade online journals, and get all of the article files you need (PDF, HTML, XML) with Scholastica's end-to-end peer review and open access publishing platform. Your journal teams will be able to receive submissions and take them through peer review and publishing all on the same application. 

Scholastica does not currently offer copy-editing services though we're happy to make a recommendation if you're seeking a copy-editing service! Once you've completed all copy-edits, you can use the Scholastica Typesetting service and we'll deliver beautiful, HTML articles as well as automatically generated PDF versions of the same article for your readers to download that you can publish whenever you're ready. 

All journals that use Scholastica OA Publishing will also be provided with machine-readable XML files in the JATS standard and with rich metadata, including article copyright, funder details, and persistent identifiers. All published articles will be automatically indexed in Google Scholar for you — no work needed on your part! Plus, Scholastica integrates with major indexing and archiving services including DOAJ and Portico. 

Please note that Scholastica does not offer bespoke, custom development — we are an out-of-the-box solution for publishers for whom Scholastica is a good fit. That being said, we're always looking for feedback on how we can improve! If you have questions or suggestions for new features, please let us know at support@scholasticahq.com.

Set up and training

As the publisher for your journals, you can choose to set up the journal yourself and then transfer admin rights over to whoever should set up the Configuration Options and Reviewer Form or you can delegate that task to the appropriate editor or staff member. Each of your journals will be offered a free training call (with accompanying screenshare) on how to best use Scholastica to achieve their goals. The training will be customized to your journal's workflow and needs.

Billing

Billing on Scholastica is easy to set up. The admin editor (scroll down to “Getting your team access” to learn more about that distinction) can enroll your journal in the appropriate plan by logging into Scholastica and navigating to My Journals > Selecting the appropriate journal from the dropdown, if you are an editor for multiple journals > Settings > Billing. From there you can enroll the journal into the appropriate subscription — Peer Review, Typesetting, and/or OA Publishing.

Payment can be made either by adding a credit card which will be invoiced automatically or by having invoices automatically sent to the appropriate person/people who then pay the invoice manually.

All possible costs that may be associated with your Scholastica account can be found on our Pricing page:

  • Peer Review
    • Annual fee
    • If set to Journal pays: Journal is billed monthly for each submission received in that 30 day period
    • If set to Author pays: Author will cover the submission fee cost themselves when they submit
  • OA Publishing
    • Annual fee
  • Typesetting
    • Billed monthly for costs accrued during that time.

Have a lump sum of money you’d like to add to the account upfront?

If you’ve been approved for a grant or a stipend for your journal and want to add that money to your account as a balance that can be drawn from to pay for the services above, no problem! Just click “+Add journal funds” on the left of the screen then note how much money you’d like to add to your account.

You’ll be issued an invoice which you can direct to the appropriate members of your team to pay. Once paid, the cash amount will appear under your journal funds and will be used to pay any charges accrued after that point. When the journal funds are depleted, you can either add more or pay normally (with an automated payment charged to a card on file or with a manual payment made to the invoice you’ll be issued).

Animation showing how to add journal funds to your account and how they appear when pending

Peer Review

Getting your team access

If you’re using Scholastica Peer Review, all editors that help with the peer review process should have their own personal login. That editor will then be able to login to Scholastica and can be invited to gain editor access to multiple journals that they work on — all via their singular, personal login. 

The admin editor on the journal’s account is the one who is able to invite new editors, revoke outgoing editors’ access, update the settings, customize the reviewer form, and update the journal profile pages. There can only be one admin editor at a time, but the rights are easy to transfer back and forth if others need that type of access at any given time. 

If you have admin rights and want to transfer them over to a different editor, you’ll first need to ensure that they have editor access. As the admin editor, to invite editors to the journal, you’ll go to My Journals > Settings > Manage Editors > Invite New Editor. 

Once the editor has accepted your invitation and created their own person login, you can transfer admin rights over to them by going to My Journals > Settings > Journal Settings> Details and selecting their name from the dropdown on the right before clicking the Transfer Admin Rights button to confirm. 

If a user no longer needs full editorial access, the admin editor can revoke that access by going to My Journals > Settings > Manage Editors then checking the box next to that user’s name before selecting “revoke” from the dropdown of actions to the top left of the Editors table.

Adding reviewers to the journal

Can I import a database of past reviewers?

Currently, journals cannot import reviewer information in advance — reviewers are added to the journal organically, as you invite them to review papers on Scholastica.

Your editors will invite reviewers to papers as they are needed. When you have a paper submitted to the journal, your editors will invite reviewers by following the steps found here.

Publishing

Why publish on Scholastica?

Creating a website isn’t too hard with the plethora of free website builders available today. Creating an excellent journal website that: automatically indexes your published articles in Google Scholar looks great and is responsive on mobile devices, and automatically creates JATS-compliant XML of your article’s metadata is a much rarer find. The good news is you can tick all of those boxes without needing to know a line of code! Scholastica’s publishing tools are as easy to use as your personal email client. To learn more information about what Scholastica OA Publishing can offer and how it works, please keep reading.

Journal website customization

Scholastica journal websites use a preset theme which you can customize further with your own chosen colors and background images. For a detailed walkthrough on what you can customize and how, please click here. Want your website’s URL to be customized too? Scholastica journal websites can be set up to use a custom domain that you’ve purchased from any domain registrar. Just follow these easy steps to point your custom domain to your Scholastica journal website.

Scholastica does not own your material — you retain copyright and can choose the appropriate Creative Commons license for all published articles under Publishing Settings.

Publishing analytics

Curious to know which of your published articles is the most downloaded and where your readers are coming from? Scholastica’s Publishing Analytics provides an easy-to-use tool that you can use to answer those questions! You’ll be able to pull analytics by your chosen date range and can even review reader behavior at the article level. To access Publishing Analytics for a journal, go to My Journals > Select the appropriate journal from the dropdown if you have editor access on more than one journal > Publishing > Publishing Analytics.

Integrations

Many journals, especially those who wish to adhere to Plan S guidelines are working with tools and services to ensure their journal is set up for success. Scholastica supports integrations with a few different tools — including the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Portico. DOAJ is a community-curated list of open access journals and is often used as a way for readers, authors, and libraries to ensure the quality of a journal. Portico is a long-term preservation and digital, “dark” (i.e., under restricted user access) archival service which is used to ensure that a journal’s scholarship and contributions to academia aren’t lost to time and faulty web servers. 

If you already have membership with any services found under your Publishing > Publishing Settings > Integrations page, you can integrate those services with Scholastica so they’ll communicate automatically, depositing published material safely into Portico and updating your DOAJ profile with your journal(s)’ new content.

Typesetting

How does this work?

If you use Scholastica Typesetting, your team will be able to take a manuscript through whatever copy-editing is needed and then you can create a Typesetting Request through Scholastica. The request will be sent to our team which will handle all necessary author communication throughout the Typesetting process before sending back a fully typeset article that's ready for you to publish. You'll receive:

  1. Attractive, easy-to-read HTML
  2. Automatically generated PDF for your readers to download if they want
  3. Machine-readable XML in the JATS standard

To learn more about how the journal editors will request a Typesetting, please click here.

Customer Support

Scholastica offers unlimited email support for our customers as well as a robust help site that includes answers to frequently asked questions and step-by-step walkthroughs of the tools and functionality on the site. When contacted within normal business hours, we're usually able to respond within a couple hours. Please note: We don't offer on-demand phone support, but don't mistake that as a lack of interest! We'd be happy to answer your questions. We find email is a better place to start to get you the information you need quickly and from a human who can help.

FAQ

Q: Should I create one journal account for all my journals or multiple journal accounts?

A: We strongly recommend creating separate journal accounts for each journal you're bringing to Scholastica. I.e. if you work at Premiere Publishing and are planning to bring both Science Is Great Journal and Humanities Forever Journal over to Scholastica, both SIGJ and HFJ should have their own separate journal accounts to receive and manage submissions. Having separate accounts helps you avoid both author confusion ("which journal am I submitting to?") and editor confusion.

Q: Can I embed content that I've published on Scholastica into my existing site?

A: If you have a journal website on Scholastica and are using OA Publishing your articles will be published on your Scholastica journal website. If you also have an external site, you should feel free to link to your Scholastica journal website from your external site so readers can find your articles. That being said, we don't offer any way to embed articles into external sites and we don't recommend hosting content in two places because it creates a poor and confusing reader experience.

Q: Can I bring over back issues?

A: Absolutely! You can either manually create and publish your back issues — backdating them so that the dates correspond to their original publication date — or you can request that we help you import back issues automatically. If you’d like to request help importing back issues, please contact us.

Q: Does Scholastica have options for member-only content (i.e. not OA)?

A: Currently, Scholastica only has publishing options for fully open-access journals. At the moment, we have no functionality to support pay-walls or member-only login before gaining access to published materials. If your journal is not open-access, not to worry! You can still use Scholastica to manage your peer review process and then publish your content elsewhere in a way that supports your needs.

Q: Do all my journals need to start at the same time?

A: Nope! It's absolutely fine to do set up your journals on a rolling basis. In fact, it's often easier than trying to coordinate a plethora of schedules all at once.