Hi all – Rob Walsh, Scholastica co-founder and lead designer here.
If you’re reading this and are a journal editor, you’ve probably noticed that the journal dashboard has a new look. I wanted to briefly communicate the benefits of this new feature and say a bit about how passionate we are about implementing incremental improvements at Scholastica and how this helps our journal partners.
Introducing the new journal dashboard
Our goal with this page was to give editors an at a glance answer to the question, “what’s going on at my journal”?
Of course, there are a couple of contexts involved in the answer to that question:
- As an editor, what’s going on with me and the journal?
- As an editor, what’s going on with the journal as a whole?
To answer this, we’ve split the page into two sections.
The first gives an editor a quick look at the to-dos that have been assigned to her as well as her manuscript assignments.
The second is a running list of all the activity that’s been going on at the journal. These activities include everything from reviewers being invited to editors making decisions on manuscripts.
Searchable activities
Something that I’m sure editors will be excited about is that the journal activity list is searchable now! You can now scan your journals history or find specific activities with ease.
Immediately take action on things that apply to you
There are many types of editors in Scholastica – some log in every day while some log in a couple times a week. To make things easier for both types of editors, actionable items are shown front and center. You can check off your to-dos, learn more about them, and see what manuscripts are currently assigned to you without ever leaving the journal dashboard.
Ok that’s nice and all but what does any of this have to do with “incremental improvements”
You may have noticed some software vendors, especially in academic publishing, do “big releases” that occur once or twice a year where they unleash a torrent of features that require a multi-page document to explain – and often a local development team to implement. Of course with Scholastica, all of our member journals receive new features collectively early and often.
If you were to browse the New Features category of our blog you would see that every few weeks we’re able to ship a mix of new features with completely new functionality along with iterative improvements on already existing features.
Recently, taking this iterative approach to heart, we’ve been able to make a number of pages mobile friendly - this includes the new journal dashboard.
Beyond this, you may have noticed that the journal create pages, manuscript decision pages, and journal profile pages have mobile layouts. Over the next few months editors, authors, reviewers, and readers should notice more of the Scholastica platform becoming mobile friendly.
That’s it for now
Thanks for taking the the time to read this update. We hope you keep enjoying Scholastica. We’re having a ball making it the best, most modern scholarly communication platform out there.
