The prospect of transitioning to new journal management software is exciting, presenting an opportunity to enhance the operational efficiency of your publishing program and improve submission and manuscript management processes for your editors, authors, and reviewers. But it can also be a little overwhelming with many moving parts to consider. If you’re thinking about migrating one or more titles to the Scholastica Peer Review System, we know you probably have a lot of questions, like:
- How long will the transition to Scholastica take?
- Will we receive training and migration support?
- What types of workflow configurations does Scholastica offer?
You’ve come to the right place! This post covers everything you need to know about moving journals to Scholastica’s peer review software and onboarding your team.
Before we dive in, you should know that there are three sides to Scholastica: our peer review software, production service, and open access journal hosting platform. Our products and services are modular, meaning they can be used together or with external systems. If you’re interested in learning about Scholastica’s other solutions, here’s a behind-the-scenes look at our production service and an overview of our OA publishing platform.
Trusted by over 1,300 journals, Scholastica works with a range of publishers across disciplines, including university presses, scholarly societies, academic institutes, and university libraries.
Should you decide to use any of Scholastica’s software and services, you can expect a smooth transition. We offer ready-to-go solutions in an intuitive, modern interface, along with free journal training and unlimited user support.
Here’s what to expect when migrating to the Scholastica Peer Review System!
Table of Contents
- Set up new journal accounts with ease
- Start with team training and support
- Easily invite editors and import reviewers
- Configure the system to fit your needs
- Set up manuscript transfers for cascading journals
- Manage all your editorial workflows in one place
- Set up streamlined production handoffs (with rich, structured metadata downstream)
- Track journal data to optimize editorial processes
- Get instant access to new features and improvements
- See what others have to say about Scholastica
Set up new journal accounts with ease
How long does it take to start using Scholastica?
You can create new journal accounts in as little as a few days. Of course, you’ll set the pace for migrating data, configuring workflow settings, and opening for submissions when you’re ready. The Scholastica team will be there to help you every step of the way (more on this below!).
Quick Tip: If you’ve never used our software before, we recommend scheduling a demo with a member of our team who will walk you through the platform and discuss your workflow goals to ensure Scholastica is the best fit for your needs.
To begin using Scholastica, you’ll first create a user login. Once signed in, you’ll see the option to start a journal, which will initiate the process for creating a journal account and connecting it to our peer review system. After you’ve completed the setup steps and are ready to activate your account, you’ll request approval, and a Scholastica representative will reach out to you shortly to verify your journal.
What do we mean by verify? The Scholastica team will confirm that you are an authorized administrator for your journal. We also check that all new journal accounts comply with the following policies to prevent predatory publications from using our software, so you can be sure only reputable journals are on Scholastica. Once that quick check is complete, we’ll activate your account.
If you’re transitioning multiple journals to Scholastica, you’ll follow the same steps above for each one. We recommend having the person who’ll manage your journals day-to-day handle the setup process for publications within their remit. That way, they can take on the role of admin right away.
Once you request verification for a new journal, a Scholastica customer support specialist will reach out to schedule a user training session with your team.
Start with team training and support
We offer user training sessions to every journal that migrates to the Scholastica Peer Review System at no additional cost. Before each training, one of our customer success specialists will reach out to ask for an overview of your journal’s current editorial processes. They’ll use that information to determine how to help your team set up the most efficient workflow in Scholastica and walk you through it. Scholastica also offers free user support for editors, authors, and reviewers, so your team won’t have to worry about fielding technical questions.
Some tips we recommend to all journals ahead of Scholastica user trainings:
- Focus on the outcomes you want for your journal rather than sticking strictly to how your workflow used to operate (this will help you embrace optimization opportunities).
- Make a clean switch to Scholastica by wrapping up in-progress manuscripts in your old system and directing all new submissions to your new Scholastica account. (Here’s why we don’t recommend importing past and pending manuscripts from an old peer review system into a new one unless absolutely necessary.)
- Use Discussions, Scholastica’s built-in email feature, for all communication about new submissions so messages are synced between Scholastica and your email!
While not required, we recommend scheduling a user training session to help your editors and publishing staff get onboarded. If everyone can’t make it at the same time, no problem! We record training calls and provide additional support to users asynchronously as needed.
Our software is also delightfully easy to use, so you’ll be cruising in no time!
Easily invite editors and import reviewers
Of course, one of the first things you’ll want to do is add editors and reviewers to Scholastica. The process is quick and easy! Admins can invite editors to each of your journal accounts by following these steps. During the invite process, they’ll set permissions for editors to ensure they only have access to the manuscripts and system settings they should. Invited editors will then receive an email with instructions for creating a Scholastica login and accessing the journal.
To add reviewers to Scholastica, journal admins can send individual invitations or bulk import an existing reviewer database. Admins can also add custom tags to reviewers to help editors sort them by specific criteria, such as research specialties. If there are inactive reviewers in your old database that your editors want to re-engage in the future, anyone with permissions can archive those reviewers in Scholastica to save their records, but keep them separate from the active reviewers’ list.
If there are manuscripts in your previous peer-review system that you’d like to move to Scholastica, you can also upload them on behalf of authors as proxy submissions. As noted, to keep things simpler for editors, authors, and reviewers, we recommend processing in-progress manuscripts in your legacy system and making a clean transition to Scholastica.
Configure the system to fit your needs
Scholastica’s Peer Review System includes comprehensive turnkey configuration options in a modern interface. So, you won’t have to wade through a web of complex settings pages and dropdowns to activate features or pay for bespoke system setup support, as can be the case with legacy platforms.
You’ll find all account-level Scholastica configuration options on the Journal Settings page and all peer review configurations on the Peer Review Settings page. If you choose to use Scholastica for production or publishing, we also have centralized configuration options for those products.
We can’t cover every single Scholastica Peer Review System configuration option here (that would be a blog series!), but here are some highlights:
- Customize your submission form to get complete manuscript details: Scholastica offers a range of ready-to-go submission form customization options to help editors ensure they receive complete submissions with necessary author disclosures and affirmations. We also offer the option to require validated metadata fields for ORCID, CRediT, ROR, and more.
- Customize your reviewer form to gather necessary input: Admins can also customize their journal’s reviewer feedback form with questions in their preferred format and order.
- Set decision-making workflow configurations to streamline processes: Admins set granular permissions for who is allowed to draft and issue decisions. Scholastica’s peer review system also includes configurations to support different decision-making workflows, including the option to create custom decision types and to enable editors to share internal decision recommendations.
- Set workflow notifications and reminders: We know how important it is to help editors, authors, and reviewers keep track of the peer review process! Scholastica includes a range of email notification options that journals can configure for this purpose, with the option to set a target number of reviews for manuscripts. Admins can also allow automatic notifications for authors about the progress of their submissions.
- Create manuscript tags for easy submission sorting: Admins can add manuscript tags to the Scholastica Peer Review System to support searching and grouping submissions by custom criteria. Tags can be applied to individual manuscripts and are only visible to editors.
- Track technical checks and research integrity review: Admins can create a technical checklist for their journal, visible to users with permission, to ensure all follow standardized manuscript evaluation policies and procedures. They can also require technical checks to be completed before editors invite reviewers and/or issue decisions, so no one takes those steps prematurely.
- Integrate with external systems and services: Scholastica also offers integrations to connect journals to external services, including research integrity and OA fee management solutions, like Crossref’s Similarity Check plagiarism detection service (powered by iThenticate) and CCC RightsLink. We’re continuing to expand our integration support, so let us know if there’s something you’re interested in!
Set up manuscript transfers for cascading journals
If you work with a portfolio of journals that includes two or more related titles, allowing editors to offer manuscript transfers between them, as appropriate, is a great way to provide added value to your authors and help keep quality submissions within your journal family.
Publishers with multiple journals using the Scholastica Peer Review System can easily set up manuscript transfers to cascade submissions by designating which journals can offer transfers and their desired transfer flow. Transfer packages include all necessary submission details, files, and metadata.
If your journal is part of a publisher’s portfolio and you think it would be beneficial to allow manuscript transfers via Scholastica, we encourage you to reach out to your publisher to start that discussion. If you are the main contact for a publisher adding multiple journals to Scholastica and you would like to set up this feature, you can do so following the steps here.
Manage all your editorial workflows in one place
Using the Scholastica Peer Review System, your team can streamline and centralize ALL of your journal workflows and communication. If you manage more than one journal via the system, your peer review managers and managing editors who work with those different titles can easily toggle between them from their user dashboard.
When you navigate to any journal you manage via Scholastica, the first thing you’ll see is your Peer Review Dashboard, which includes a searchable log of your team’s activity for that title so you can see when editors completed various actions. You’ll also see a To-dos section where you can assign tasks to yourself or other team members (e.g., a reminder to complete technical checks). You can easily filter To-dos by assignor, assignee, and status.
To manage journal submissions, you’ll navigate to your Manuscripts Table. There, you can search across papers (e.g., to find a specific piece or check an author’s past submissions) and sort them using our powerful manuscript filtering options. Your editors can even save custom Manuscript Table Views (filters and column order) to quickly manage submissions at specific stages (e.g., “ready for copyediting”). Manuscript Table Views are created at the user level, so each of your editors can have their own custom views.
The Manuscripts Table is where editors with appropriate permissions can assign manuscripts to themselves and others, either individually or via bulk actions. Editors will navigate to the Editor Work Area for submissions within their remit to manage those papers. There, they will be able to start and respond to Discussions. Recipients can view and respond to Discussions from Scholastica or their email, and all Discussion threads are saved in Scholastica with the corresponding manuscript.
Editors can also create Discussion message templates, in addition to decision letter templates, to standardize recurring communication and save time, such as to send authors of accepted submissions information on production next steps.
Set up streamlined production handoffs (with rich, structured metadata downstream)
The Scholastica Peer Review System also includes production workflow integration options to help you streamline publishing handoffs.
If you choose to use the Scholastica Production Service, your team can import accepted, copy-edited manuscripts (with associated structured XML metadata) from our peer review system into our production service without any preformatting steps, saving editors and authors time. Our production team will then use a software-based process to generate full-text XML, PDF, and HTML article files from a single source, so they’re always in sync. From there, journals using the Scholastica OA Publishing Platform can publish articles as soon as they’re ready in a few clicks. We can also help you with exporting articles to an external hosting provider (ask us about options!).
If you need additional editorial services, such as copyediting support, Scholastica collaborates with affiliate providers that we can recommend (or we’re happy to partner with your vendor of choice!). We can help you set up Scholastica accounts for copyeditors so they can send final manuscripts to our production team as they’re ready, without your editors having to worry about handoff steps.
Alternatively, if you want to send accepted manuscripts to an in-house production system or an external service, you can do so via FTP. Editors granted permission will be able to export manuscript packages, including font-matter XML metadata, the most recent manuscript file, supplementary files, and peer review communication, to your chosen destination.
Track journal data to optimize editorial processes
Scholastica’s peer review system features a built-in journal analytics suite that editorial teams can use to track submission stats and support data-driven workflow decisions, including:
- Number of manuscript submissions by date
- Manuscripts in progress (with a breakdown by each phase of review)
- Number of manuscripts per editor (average and totals)
- Days to a decision at the journal and editor level
- Acceptance and rejection rate at the journal and editor level
From the Scholastica Reviewers Table, editors can also easily track reviewer performance metrics, including:
- Pending invitations
- Pending and late review assignments
- Number of invitations received and date of last invite
- Number of reviews completed
- Average days to complete a review
As you accrue journal data in Scholastica, you can use our built-in analytics to track journal performance and ensure you’re receiving sufficient submissions.
If you want to dig into further journal-level data (e.g., peer review activity), admins can pull raw data from the Scholastica Peer Review System as a series of .csv files, which you can use to generate additional reports.
Get instant access to new features and improvements
Using Scholastica, you can be sure that you’ll always have access to the latest software. We universally apply new features and system upgrades to all journal accounts as they become available, so you don’t have to wait for releases or install updates.
We’re continually adding new features to Scholastica to make life easier for our users and stay at the forefront of current industry best practices. Scholastica is also supporting the development and implementation of industry-wide standards to improve research dissemination, discovery, and interoperability. Subscribe to our blog to be notified about all our latest updates.
See what others have to say about Scholastica
We hope this overview of transitioning one or more journals to the Scholastica Peer Review System was helpful! Curious to learn more about the types of publishers Scholastica supports and other journals’ transition experiences?
Visit our Customer Stories and Testimonials pages to see what publishers and editors have to say about migrating to Scholastica.
Update Note: This blog post was originally published on June 20, 2023 and updated to reflect Scholastica’s latest features on April, 21 2026.
