Journals now have access to a new settings to control whether a reviewer who has received an invitation, but has not yet confirmed their willingness to write a review, can see supporting manuscript files.

By default, journals share the manuscript file and supporting files with reviewers because it is helpful for the reviewer to look at the specific manuscript in order to decide whether to accept the reviewer invitation or not.

For those journals that only want to share the manuscript file and supporting files with reviewers after they have accepted the review invitation, the new journal configuration option is perfect.

To update your journal, go to My Journals > Settings > Configuration Options and scroll down to the Reviewer Options section.

There’s a great article about the Scholastica founders in the May/June issue of The University of Chicago Magazine:

Here’s a closer look at the first piece of Scholastica Analytics – a beautiful way for journal editors to holistically understand data about their journals on Scholastica.

Scholastica Analytics is the next iteration of our effort to help editors view and understand key metrics about their journals. As journal editors have given us feedback on the previous iteration of this page (then called “reports” we set aside time to have deeper discussions about how editors assimilate and understand their journal data. We’ve taken everything we’ve learned and put that knowledge into Scholastica Analytics.

The new analytics page is a beautiful way for an editor to holistically understand data about their journal from its creation on Scholastica to the present day. Let’s take a closer look.

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Many law reviews have chosen to use Scholastica to manage articles – the question is, why? And how does Scholastica help authors?

When an author submits an article to a law review through ExpressO, most of the time that submission has been sent to the journal as an email – an email among thousands of other submission emails, an email among thousands of expedite request emails, an email among thousands of author question emails, and ultimately an email among tens of thousands of emails within a 2 month period. The law review is then tasked with managing thousands of emails in their inbox – and an email inbox littered with messages and attachments isn’t a good way to manage scholarship. It’s not good for the law review or the author.

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There are some law reviews who allow authors to submit optional demographic information when submitting articles through Scholastica. Demographic information can be a sensitive subject, and we’ve seen misinformation on the web about how demographic information came into being and how it is used, so we wanted to give more details on how optional demographic information works on Scholastica.

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Scholastica (http://www.scholasticahq.com) has launched an all-new law review submissions process to help legal scholars identify which law reviews are best-suited for their article.

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Here at Scholastica, we hear lots of complaining about the current state of scholarly publishing. Managing a journal can be really time-consuming, starting a new journal can be daunting, and publishing peer-reviewed Open Access scholarship has its own set of challenges. Our friends Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice and Merleau-Ponty had success using Scholastica recently and wanted their story told.

Part 1. In which Bertie wants to participate in the scholarly world online.

One day not too long ago, Bertrand Russell, or “Bertie” as his friends call him, was lounging in bed with his Macbook Air when he thought to himself, “Oh dear, writing the Principia Mathematica surely has taken up a great deal of my efforts as of late. Now that it is completed, how will I spend all of my new-found free time?”

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Aaron Swartz’s life caught my imagination – so much so that I found myself almost involuntarily inside a thought experiment: what would have happened if Aaron had released the full 100% of JSTOR’s content?

I have faith that many tech-savvy professors would have loved freeing their home institution’s subscription budget by downloading and using the JSTOR archive leak – but my guess is that their home institutions would have pushed back hard. The risk of lawsuit would be seen as very high if professors using university computers, or professors using university email, were to commit millions of individual copyright violations. The universities would put pressure on faculty to not download or even use the leaked JSTOR content out of fear from lawsuit by JSTOR or the individual publishers.

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If you’ve read our blog for a while, you probably know that Scholastica is passionate about providing infrastructure that enables scholars to manage and publish peer reviewed journals themselves. It’s a lofty goal and we’re far from completing our vision – at the same time, though, we’re proud of how far we’ve come and very thankful to those who have been with us up to this point.

While Scholastica is not currently, and has no designs to be in the future, an application used only within the legal scholarship world, we are very proud to work with a substantial number of law journals. As we’ve read the press and spoken to authors, editors, and reviewers, we see that many people think the legal publishing process is broken.

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