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Transforming ScholarOne: The Evolution of Publishing Workflows
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Transforming ScholarOne: The Evolution of Publishing Workflows
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Segment:0 .
All right. Hello opening sessions for SSP. Welcome thanks for joining us here to talk about Silverchair and ScholarOne. My name is Josh Dahl. I'm the Sr. Vice President of product at Silverchair. I'm also the general manager of ScholarOne. It's a pleasure to talk to you about our future, our future plans, our future vision for ScholarOne.
As part of the new Silverchair organization, I'll be joined today by a product manager on my team, Adrian Fisher, who'll be talking about some of the specific areas that we're working to advance. There we go. All right, so first let's take a step back. Introduce reintroduce ScholarOne. Scholar one has been on the market for 25 years.
You probably know it. You've probably used it. You've known about it on the market. But I thought it's worth just giving a little bit of a snapshot of the impact that ScholarOne has had over the last that's 25 years. This is something that was key when we were getting acquired by Silverchair. A key driver was our history, but also the future potential.
Scholar one gets, on average, 10,000 submissions a day from researchers across the world. That's a huge volume of the research output annually that's coming through our platforms. Our publishers are growing their journals on ScholarOne at an impressive rate as well. Scholar one adds one new journal every day and has for the last 20 years. That's a pretty impressive stat, and it's the thing that drives that submission growth, but also our long tail of customers outside of just big commercial players.
Those 10,000 submissions a day, they drive millions of researchers every month, logging into ScholarOne, submitting revisions, accepting peer review invitations, managing the workflows. Our authors and reviewers are important stakeholders for us. We think about how they perceive the platform, whether they find it easy to use. This is an important metric for us and important for not just how we've perceived the product in the past, but how we develop it out into the future.
82% of authors, when they are rated after completing a submission rate, the process is pretty easy. Not a bad stat. Not a bad starting point. 88% of reviewers say the process was easy as well, and this is based on thousands and thousands of polls to researchers upon completion of that in ScholarOne. So a pretty good starting point.
And again, if you look at the impact ScholarOne has had over the 25 years, pretty impressive. That kind of brings us to the next phase, though, of ScholarOne, the next phase of this evolution of this product. And I was thinking back when I was prepping for the presentation last year at this time, we were in Boston. I was preparing for my industry breakout session presentation on ScholarOne. Last year, we had our first in-person meeting with Will Schweitzer and the Silverchair executive team.
The morning of my presentation. Got to meet them. Spent three hours with them talking about the business. They obviously understood the impact, the impact of ScholarOne, the scale that it has. But I think the thing that really energized me and really energized the team that I was with was the future thoughts like, what could we be doing. How can we accelerate developments.
How can we move forward and change things so that we can help address some of the biggest challenges that publishers have. Some of the first things we did following the acquisition in November is we changed our approach to community. Scholar one the community aspect had lapsed a bit under prior ownership. We didn't have in-person user group meetings.
We hadn't since 2018. Some of our digital formats were eroding, and this is something that is core to Silverchair's beliefs is community will drive our roadmap. We want to be lockstep with our customers and with the market as we're thinking about developing this product. And so we restarted a lot of the initiatives that had fallen by the wayside. Quarterly roadmap updates for any customer that wants to see them.
Customer advocate groups for deep insight from some of our key accounts. We have working groups around topics like research integrity and the author experience. And we're restarting a user conference in person user conference this year tied to the Silverchair platforms meeting in Washington, DC. So community is going to help us drive our forward path.
And it's been part of this initial six months of changes to ScholarOne as we've been integrated into Silverchair. We also know that ScholarOne, there's a need to continue and accelerate investment into what we're doing to modernize parts of the application that maybe need some modernization. This is something that again, immediate change that happened. There's a lot more focus.
We've got more investment and new people thinking about how we're going to modernize and accelerate development on ScholarOne, and we'll talk about some of those developments are in a little bit, because you don't want to just hear one bullet point on this. Finally, we're thinking about partnerships a lot differently. Silverchair had a robust universe partner program that they were open and collaborative. They were really working to make a plug and play ecosystem for any publisher that wanted to plug-in New solutions and try out different tools that might address some of their needs.
We've immediately changed that as well. Starting in early this year, we aligned the ScholarOne partnerships with Silverchair universe, and we're right now ramping up development on capabilities to make it really easy for us to start plugging in New solutions into ScholarOne. You've probably seen some of the announcements about the partnerships that are underway, and this is just a preview of what's to come in terms of having an open platform that you can try out new solutions.
A little dry mouth. One one second. All right. So leads me to the vision. Where are we going with ScholarOne. What's going to change. What's near-term what's kind of further out in the future.
How are we thinking about this critical publishing technology. I think one of the core messages here is that we need to level up. Scholar one, ScholarOne has been great. It's achieved huge scale and impact over 25 years, but we know there's another 25 years we need to be thinking about. How about another 10 years that we need to be thinking about. With the pace of technology changes these days.
Scholar one we need to continue emphasizing the scalable and flexible aspect of the product, but we also need to make sure that we're focusing on the experience. People are used to a different experience with consumer applications. We need to make sure that we're plugging in the latest technology. And that ScholarOne continues to be both effective and enjoyable for stakeholders.
And that's really a lot of what our roadmap is centered around, is how we can continue to make it scalable, flexible, effective, and enjoyable. So a couple of things, really we've organized our vision around these four pillars. We think these pillars are the most important things for us to be working on us to be investing our time and money and effort into.
We think these things resonate well with our customers, and they attack some of the biggest challenges head on that our publishers are facing. The first needs no introduction. We all know the research integrity crisis is booming. It is a major reputational risk for our customers. It's a major risk to trust in science. It's a huge bottleneck for our publishing customers and adds a lot of cost and time.
And this is something that publishers need to be moving quickly on, and we need to be helping them move quickly to address the challenge. So one of our big focus areas is really just focus on research integrity and how we can shore up capabilities in scholar. One we're focused on the experience. So I mentioned, author researcher experience huge priority for our publishing customers.
They want to make the best experiences drive engagement drive repeat authors repeat reviewers. So obviously we're focusing on that side of it. But we also want to think about the other side of it. What about the staff, the thousands of editors and editorial assistants and handling editors and publishing staff. So when we're thinking about the experience, we're really thinking about the two sides of this.
Obviously, the front side of this, your front door for researchers, but also how are we building tools in the future and how are we going to better integrate them and make it easier to use them for your new batch of editors that are coming into your platforms. We're thinking about integration. So I talked about our partnership approach, how we're scaling up integrations.
We're making it easier to integrate in ScholarOne. And that's going to have an impact on our roadmap. So we're focused on how we can accelerate and scale up a lot of those integrations in different ways. That makes it easy for new partners, new solutions to plug into ScholarOne. So we're talking a little bit about that in a moment as well. And then last but not least is that modernization theme again. Scholar one is not the same.
Scholar one, it was when it launched in 2000. Manuscript central version 1. But there is some need to modernize and we want to move faster. We want to scale faster, and we want to be able to do new things, plug-in New technology. And a lot of that requires investment in modernizing. So I'm just going to take a quick side note before we go to the roadmap part of this and talk about modernization.
Again, ScholarOne has substantial scale. It's mission critical. It needs to be up 100% of the time when it's down for unexpected reasons. That causes delays for our customers. It hurts the end user experience, so we need to be careful about how we approach modernization. We're approaching it with two core principles around this. One is creating a centralized architecture governance, which is high level thinking about how we go about modernizing the application.
This is an approach that we're taking. That's not a Big Bang. We're not releasing ScholarOne version 7 in 2027. We are taking an iterative approach that's going to start to attack some of the core problems in an iterative way, that we can also continue to release new features to our customers. The other side of this is balancing those quick wins. What are the things we can do now that are going to have a big impact, that are lower risk while we continue that long term optimization that's happening.
So a lot of this is a great blog post outlining this on Silverchair. Highly recommend. Go read that if you're interested. Talks a lot more from our CTO about how we're approaching modernization. I'm noticing all the fonts blew up. That's all right.
Not a big deal. It could be worse problems. So I'm going to hand it over to Adrian to talk a little bit about some of the core things that we're working on. Adrian Josh and I have very different needs with this microphone height. My name is Adrian Fisher. I am the senior product manager for Scotland manuscripts at Silverchair, and I'm here today to discuss some big developments that we've got planned coming up for ScholarOne.
It's a very exciting time for us, and we have a lot of very big changes coming very soon. So I'm very happy to share some of those things with you guys today. So one of the biggest opportunity areas for us is making improvements to the user experience. It is no secret that we have a very old UI. It has been in use for a very long time.
And it is great at some things, but over the years has fallen behind in terms of design, modernization and ease of use, which are two things that are pretty critical to creating a good, easy, pleasant user experience for anyone who is remotely internet literate, which at this point is pretty much all of us. We've also been seeing publisher needs shift over the past couple of years towards wanting more centralization, and not just centralization in terms of tools and resources for researchers existing in a single place, but also in service of being able to improve operational efficiencies, especially when the need is managing a very large portfolio of journals that is only going to grow larger.
So last year, we set out to work through how we might start going about solving for some of these problems. We began by building out a central dashboard concept that we had tested a couple of years ago, with some end users with very promising results. We then recruited some of our customers to partner with us in a development partner capacity for some very thorough and ongoing feedback sessions and intensive design workshops with our UX team.
And the goal of these sessions was to start to tease out gaps and opportunities that were really important for our customer base. We wanted to make sure that any redesign effort we embarked upon was moving in the right direction to support our customers. The result of all that work is our very first steps toward a redesigned scholar, one, which is a project that we have coined ScholarOne gateway.
So ScholarOne gateway is a lightweight, agile, redesigned app that sits atop the existing ScholarOne app, and it is built to provide a brand new and improved user experience for authors and reviewers. But I do want to stress that ScholarOne gateway is not just a redesign, it's a reworking of ScholarOne. Gateway provides researchers with a single view of their author and reviewer tasks across a given publisher's portfolio, which means that we are going to be shifting our user account structure from one account per journal to one account per publisher.
Scholar one gateway is also going to be natively integrated with all of the publisher's existing ScholarOne journals, meaning that gateway will act as a central access point to begin and complete submissions, to reply, to review invitations to overall manage your workload in a single place. And this is largely in response to the overall dislike of journals operating as these silos for many, many years.
So ultimately, the core value of gateway looks to really pull that all together to really make a big difference in improving the user experience. So we do have a couple of screenshots to share. So the first one here is the screenshot of the Scala one gateway dashboard. As you can see we've got a fresh look.
It's very clean. It's very, very little noise. We've got a side rail for navigation, much more modern design than our existing application. And we also have clear delineation of author and reviewer tasks, default organization of items that need action, items that don't and very clear calls to action that demonstrate what the next step is in the peer review cycle for that document.
The goal here was really to make the information on this page absolutely unmistakable, both for a better user experience and also to help reduce burden on editorial teams that may be flooded with researchers who are sending in queries asking about the information they're seeing on a given screen. So while the headline feature of gateway is that single view for a user, gateway is implemented per publisher, which means that we are able to offer a lot of flexibility on configuration and look and feel options in ways that we have not been able to do previously.
The intent is to allow publishers to really make gateway feel their own, and the way that we are helping them do that is that we have built in tons of customization options, even for our pilot version. We can place announcements and banners on the landing page. We can customize and style different guidelines and resources throughout the gateway application. And maybe most importantly, we've also built in schema to do look and feel color updates so that publishers can make updates to the UI that are consistent with their brand, their brand guidelines, again, ensuring that gateway truly is their own.
Every gateway implementation also includes a journal finder section, which includes a full list of journals for that publisher and publishers can customize what information appears for each journal, and make sure that they are empowering their authors to find the right one with the right information at the right time. Users can then browse that list, compare and contrast journals that they're interested in, and when they're ready, they can begin a submission right there on the spot due to the native integration between gateway and the legacy app.
So this is obviously a major, major area and move for us. And ScholarOne, we're very, very excited about this. I do want to mention that it is not quite widely available yet for our broader customer base. We are currently in a closed beta testing period with a few very generous publishers who have offered to be our Guinea pigs and our early adopters. So as we run this closed beta testing period, which is basically a pilot, we will be spending the next few months gathering feedback, doing user interviews, and basically iterating accordingly on all of that data before we look to expand it more broadly to our customer base.
So switching gears. Josh had just mentioned that one of the things that we're working on this year as well is ensuring that we make it much easier to do a plug and play for different partners and third party vendors that our customers are interested in bringing into their peer review cycles. So that is exactly what we're doing.
We are going to be ramping up capabilities for integrating with external tools and services. There are a ton of new tools, a ton of cool new tools on the market right now. All of them know geared toward solving specific publisher needs, some of them quite niche, and being able to plug those tools directly into the scholar. One workflow is really how you're going to maximize the most value from them.
But historically, that hasn't always been an easy task, with ScholarOne usually taking quite a long time to stand up an integration, and with limitations around what we can and can't support from a technical standpoint. So to that end, we knew that we had to make some improvements and pay some attention to this area, really to make it much faster to integrate with a third party tool in ScholarOne and then be able to scale it accordingly and maybe offer it out more broadly.
And so this is what scholar ScholarOne really was built to achieve. Relay is our new solution for supporting robust and scalable integrations in ScholarOne. It is an API layer that enables a two way directional for data, meaning that ScholarOne can now ingest and display information from external sources and third party vendors when previously our capabilities only covered the outbound flow of data.
But now we'll be able to really maximize and enhance the utility of lots of third party solutions right there in our workflows to help our customers stay competitive, to make sure that they have the right enhancements in the peer review workflow that they want at the right time. So the initial use case that inspired relay was around the research integrity space, tons of new tools and tons of tools on the market in the research integrity space, and tons of eyes on the research integrity space, on how to improve quality screening and make sure that we're monitoring for bad actors and all the other ways that people take advantage of the peer review lifecycle for their own benefit.
So the intent was to start figuring out how to corral all of the different research integrity tools in the market, getting them working with ScholarOne data, packaging them nicely in the UI, and then that way that will empower editorial teams with the right data embedded at the right place in the workflow relay will ultimately go beyond research integrity initiatives as well.
In addition to enabling the two way data flow, it also supports faster and easier integration builds, which means that we can try out and test out the efficacy of various tools in our product. With speed, making faster decisions about what is worth scaling and pursuing further, and maybe what isn't quite working. So similar to ScholarOne, gateway relay is not quite ready for broad use yet, but we are kicking off a pilot specifically aimed at research integrity tools with a few of our customers.
That pilot is kicking off pretty much around right now. Our first round of partners are signals, clear skies, cactus and the SDM integrity hub. So all the heavy hitters. But ultimately we're going to be wanting to take a sky's the limit approach with this new capability. Scholar one's existing infrastructure has excellent workflow support, and bringing in third party partners will only enhance and support the peer review lifecycle exactly how our publishers need it to.
So I'm going to hand it back to Josh. But if you want to talk gateway or relay further at any point this week, come find us at the booth. I'm happy to do a demo of gateway. Like I said, we're very excited about these upcoming product changes, and we'll be happy to talk to you about it whenever you'd like. So thank you.
Almost ready to clap. Yeah we'll have a few minutes for questions. Last thing I wanted to talk about is I. I'm not here to pitch you on a new AI product that we've got ready to launch that you guys can buy right now. This is about the future, though. AI is going to disrupt this space. It's going to provide huge advantages to publishers and platforms that adopt it.
And we want to be part of the leading edge of that exploration. Silverchair has a history of being at the leading edge. A couple years ago, they launched their Silverchair AI labs initiative to help their platform customers experiment with AI and their data and come up with novel ways to apply AI to the user interfaces that researchers and consumers were using to access their content.
And we're taking the same approach with ScholarOne. We want to take an experimental approach. We want to co-create different AI solutions and test out different ways that I can help improve the editorial workflow. And we're really focusing on our sweet spot, that workflow, that workflow with so many checks and so many different manual processes that really delay time to decision.
And how could we apply AI in the right way to be able to speed up that process. We're going to be collaborative about this. We're not taking a we're the only ones that can do this approach, just like we do with all the partnerships. We recently announced a partnership with humm, working with joint customers that are testing out alchemist review. Alchemist review shows a lot of promise to help address some of the areas that we think are most important for our customers to be thinking about.
But we also want to be able to test out other ways that I could be applied. Our own Silverchair AI lab team working with the Scala one team has spun up in Scala one AI Playground. It was recently announced on Tuesday so you can read more about it there. But this is a way that we're going to be able to start to rapidly iterate and experiment with our own customers.
About different AI use cases right in the Scala one workflow. We've already got a lineup of 20 publishers that have expressed interest. And we're going to be starting to that testing process in the coming weeks and months. We'll be opening that up and adding more publishers to that testing. And again, this is going to be a way that we can double track how I can be applied to the workflow.
So that brings us to the end. As Adrian said, we're at booth 301. Myself, Adrian and a team of people here from Silverchair to talk about what's going on, and we've got about four or five minutes for questions right now. If anyone has any. I think we've got a microphone in the middle that ideally you could ask the question from there.
Hi, Josh. Hey, Mark. I'm curious about relay as an integration framework or set of APIs. I'm not exactly sure how to think about that, but how long has it been in development and is it informed by and compatible with Silverchair APIs.
So it's completely separate from Silverchair APIs, but it's part of the suite of APIs that ScholarOne has around it. So we've got a really robust set of APIs to get information out that's been available since 2017. And we've continued to build on that. It's the same set of APIs, but this is now an API to push information back into ScholarOne. So really what it's going to do essentially is we're going to have different use cases that it can support.
So we'll expect different data back in the API. The package that we get from an external party. And we'll do different things in ScholarOne with that. So just as an example the research integrity use case, we're going to be getting, we've got four different vendors that are going to be sending us similar packages. They ran a test on this paper. They got the full text. They sent it back.
Here's the alerts that they want to flag. They'll be able to customize what the alerts are within a message. But we're going to do things in the application raise the banner on the manuscript within the editorial workflow. If a flag comes in, allow a direct link out to the full report along with the blurb that the integrator sends us.
So it's going to be essentially a way that we can just replicate and create new use cases. That relay will support that. Anyone that's trying to cover that use case can start to use in the future. So yeah. Thank you. Yeah hi. Greg Fagan from aptara.
So do you have ScholarOne at the peer review end and the Silverchair platform at the publication end. When you're talking about interoperability, are you talking about plugging into publishers workflows, all those steps in between those two things. The million dollar question. Yeah I mean, this is an area that we think there's a lot of interest. We've heard a lot of interest from our publishing customers about how we can help to bridge that gap from the submission and peer review system to the publishing platform.
I think right now we don't have any specific plans that we can talk about right now, but it is an area that we're exploring. We think that some of these other near-term areas that we're focused on have the most pressing need for our customers. While we think about that longer term plan for what a joint ScholarOne plus Silverchair could be, I do think that how we can plug information into those platforms is going to be a use case where we're going to support pretty quickly, especially sharing information with those production systems and publishing platforms, but also getting information back in.
Scholar one was it published. Was it retracted, that sort of thing. So we do see that sort of information sharing happening. It's just not on our next six to nine month roadmap. Thank you. We have time for one more question. If anyone has any. Oh, good.
Here I am. Hi, Josh. Yes so the AI sandbox IEEE, as you can imagine, has a lot of internal expertise in all things AI and ML. How did you choose the 20 customers and did we say no. I don't know who's on the list. I will let you know. It's not a specific clause.
I'm pretty sure IEEE is on there, but we've got how it was chosen. We had our editor experience working group, so I mentioned that we've got working groups that are running talking about specific topics. And the product manager in charge of that I initiative started talking about this, and we got an initial list of publishers from that working group that wanted to be involved.
So we haven't closed the door on that. We would absolutely love to talk more about involvement for many of our customers. So we will. And this is not going to be this is going to be opening up quickly about that exploration with customers. Because I have a whole committee of volunteers working on coming up with AI projects for us.
Perfect yeah, perfect. All right. We are at time again. Thanks, everyone so much for joining your first session here. And we'll see you at SSP this week.
Segment:0 .
All right. Hello opening sessions for SSP. Welcome thanks for joining us here to talk about Silverchair and ScholarOne. My name is Josh Dahl. I'm the Sr. Vice President of product at Silverchair. I'm also the general manager of ScholarOne. It's a pleasure to talk to you about our future, our future plans, our future vision for ScholarOne.
As part of the new Silverchair organization, I'll be joined today by a product manager on my team, Adrian Fisher, who'll be talking about some of the specific areas that we're working to advance. There we go. All right, so first let's take a step back. Introduce reintroduce ScholarOne. Scholar one has been on the market for 25 years.
You probably know it. You've probably used it. You've known about it on the market. But I thought it's worth just giving a little bit of a snapshot of the impact that ScholarOne has had over the last that's 25 years. This is something that was key when we were getting acquired by Silverchair. A key driver was our history, but also the future potential.
Scholar one gets, on average, 10,000 submissions a day from researchers across the world. That's a huge volume of the research output annually that's coming through our platforms. Our publishers are growing their journals on ScholarOne at an impressive rate as well. Scholar one adds one new journal every day and has for the last 20 years. That's a pretty impressive stat, and it's the thing that drives that submission growth, but also our long tail of customers outside of just big commercial players.
Those 10,000 submissions a day, they drive millions of researchers every month, logging into ScholarOne, submitting revisions, accepting peer review invitations, managing the workflows. Our authors and reviewers are important stakeholders for us. We think about how they perceive the platform, whether they find it easy to use. This is an important metric for us and important for not just how we've perceived the product in the past, but how we develop it out into the future.
82% of authors, when they are rated after completing a submission rate, the process is pretty easy. Not a bad stat. Not a bad starting point. 88% of reviewers say the process was easy as well, and this is based on thousands and thousands of polls to researchers upon completion of that in ScholarOne. So a pretty good starting point.
And again, if you look at the impact ScholarOne has had over the 25 years, pretty impressive. That kind of brings us to the next phase, though, of ScholarOne, the next phase of this evolution of this product. And I was thinking back when I was prepping for the presentation last year at this time, we were in Boston. I was preparing for my industry breakout session presentation on ScholarOne. Last year, we had our first in-person meeting with Will Schweitzer and the Silverchair executive team.
The morning of my presentation. Got to meet them. Spent three hours with them talking about the business. They obviously understood the impact, the impact of ScholarOne, the scale that it has. But I think the thing that really energized me and really energized the team that I was with was the future thoughts like, what could we be doing. How can we accelerate developments.
How can we move forward and change things so that we can help address some of the biggest challenges that publishers have. Some of the first things we did following the acquisition in November is we changed our approach to community. Scholar one the community aspect had lapsed a bit under prior ownership. We didn't have in-person user group meetings.
We hadn't since 2018. Some of our digital formats were eroding, and this is something that is core to Silverchair's beliefs is community will drive our roadmap. We want to be lockstep with our customers and with the market as we're thinking about developing this product. And so we restarted a lot of the initiatives that had fallen by the wayside. Quarterly roadmap updates for any customer that wants to see them.
Customer advocate groups for deep insight from some of our key accounts. We have working groups around topics like research integrity and the author experience. And we're restarting a user conference in person user conference this year tied to the Silverchair platforms meeting in Washington, DC. So community is going to help us drive our forward path.
And it's been part of this initial six months of changes to ScholarOne as we've been integrated into Silverchair. We also know that ScholarOne, there's a need to continue and accelerate investment into what we're doing to modernize parts of the application that maybe need some modernization. This is something that again, immediate change that happened. There's a lot more focus.
We've got more investment and new people thinking about how we're going to modernize and accelerate development on ScholarOne, and we'll talk about some of those developments are in a little bit, because you don't want to just hear one bullet point on this. Finally, we're thinking about partnerships a lot differently. Silverchair had a robust universe partner program that they were open and collaborative. They were really working to make a plug and play ecosystem for any publisher that wanted to plug-in New solutions and try out different tools that might address some of their needs.
We've immediately changed that as well. Starting in early this year, we aligned the ScholarOne partnerships with Silverchair universe, and we're right now ramping up development on capabilities to make it really easy for us to start plugging in New solutions into ScholarOne. You've probably seen some of the announcements about the partnerships that are underway, and this is just a preview of what's to come in terms of having an open platform that you can try out new solutions.
A little dry mouth. One one second. All right. So leads me to the vision. Where are we going with ScholarOne. What's going to change. What's near-term what's kind of further out in the future.
How are we thinking about this critical publishing technology. I think one of the core messages here is that we need to level up. Scholar one, ScholarOne has been great. It's achieved huge scale and impact over 25 years, but we know there's another 25 years we need to be thinking about. How about another 10 years that we need to be thinking about. With the pace of technology changes these days.
Scholar one we need to continue emphasizing the scalable and flexible aspect of the product, but we also need to make sure that we're focusing on the experience. People are used to a different experience with consumer applications. We need to make sure that we're plugging in the latest technology. And that ScholarOne continues to be both effective and enjoyable for stakeholders.
And that's really a lot of what our roadmap is centered around, is how we can continue to make it scalable, flexible, effective, and enjoyable. So a couple of things, really we've organized our vision around these four pillars. We think these pillars are the most important things for us to be working on us to be investing our time and money and effort into.
We think these things resonate well with our customers, and they attack some of the biggest challenges head on that our publishers are facing. The first needs no introduction. We all know the research integrity crisis is booming. It is a major reputational risk for our customers. It's a major risk to trust in science. It's a huge bottleneck for our publishing customers and adds a lot of cost and time.
And this is something that publishers need to be moving quickly on, and we need to be helping them move quickly to address the challenge. So one of our big focus areas is really just focus on research integrity and how we can shore up capabilities in scholar. One we're focused on the experience. So I mentioned, author researcher experience huge priority for our publishing customers.
They want to make the best experiences drive engagement drive repeat authors repeat reviewers. So obviously we're focusing on that side of it. But we also want to think about the other side of it. What about the staff, the thousands of editors and editorial assistants and handling editors and publishing staff. So when we're thinking about the experience, we're really thinking about the two sides of this.
Obviously, the front side of this, your front door for researchers, but also how are we building tools in the future and how are we going to better integrate them and make it easier to use them for your new batch of editors that are coming into your platforms. We're thinking about integration. So I talked about our partnership approach, how we're scaling up integrations.
We're making it easier to integrate in ScholarOne. And that's going to have an impact on our roadmap. So we're focused on how we can accelerate and scale up a lot of those integrations in different ways. That makes it easy for new partners, new solutions to plug into ScholarOne. So we're talking a little bit about that in a moment as well. And then last but not least is that modernization theme again. Scholar one is not the same.
Scholar one, it was when it launched in 2000. Manuscript central version 1. But there is some need to modernize and we want to move faster. We want to scale faster, and we want to be able to do new things, plug-in New technology. And a lot of that requires investment in modernizing. So I'm just going to take a quick side note before we go to the roadmap part of this and talk about modernization.
Again, ScholarOne has substantial scale. It's mission critical. It needs to be up 100% of the time when it's down for unexpected reasons. That causes delays for our customers. It hurts the end user experience, so we need to be careful about how we approach modernization. We're approaching it with two core principles around this. One is creating a centralized architecture governance, which is high level thinking about how we go about modernizing the application.
This is an approach that we're taking. That's not a Big Bang. We're not releasing ScholarOne version 7 in 2027. We are taking an iterative approach that's going to start to attack some of the core problems in an iterative way, that we can also continue to release new features to our customers. The other side of this is balancing those quick wins. What are the things we can do now that are going to have a big impact, that are lower risk while we continue that long term optimization that's happening.
So a lot of this is a great blog post outlining this on Silverchair. Highly recommend. Go read that if you're interested. Talks a lot more from our CTO about how we're approaching modernization. I'm noticing all the fonts blew up. That's all right.
Not a big deal. It could be worse problems. So I'm going to hand it over to Adrian to talk a little bit about some of the core things that we're working on. Adrian Josh and I have very different needs with this microphone height. My name is Adrian Fisher. I am the senior product manager for Scotland manuscripts at Silverchair, and I'm here today to discuss some big developments that we've got planned coming up for ScholarOne.
It's a very exciting time for us, and we have a lot of very big changes coming very soon. So I'm very happy to share some of those things with you guys today. So one of the biggest opportunity areas for us is making improvements to the user experience. It is no secret that we have a very old UI. It has been in use for a very long time.
And it is great at some things, but over the years has fallen behind in terms of design, modernization and ease of use, which are two things that are pretty critical to creating a good, easy, pleasant user experience for anyone who is remotely internet literate, which at this point is pretty much all of us. We've also been seeing publisher needs shift over the past couple of years towards wanting more centralization, and not just centralization in terms of tools and resources for researchers existing in a single place, but also in service of being able to improve operational efficiencies, especially when the need is managing a very large portfolio of journals that is only going to grow larger.
So last year, we set out to work through how we might start going about solving for some of these problems. We began by building out a central dashboard concept that we had tested a couple of years ago, with some end users with very promising results. We then recruited some of our customers to partner with us in a development partner capacity for some very thorough and ongoing feedback sessions and intensive design workshops with our UX team.
And the goal of these sessions was to start to tease out gaps and opportunities that were really important for our customer base. We wanted to make sure that any redesign effort we embarked upon was moving in the right direction to support our customers. The result of all that work is our very first steps toward a redesigned scholar, one, which is a project that we have coined ScholarOne gateway.
So ScholarOne gateway is a lightweight, agile, redesigned app that sits atop the existing ScholarOne app, and it is built to provide a brand new and improved user experience for authors and reviewers. But I do want to stress that ScholarOne gateway is not just a redesign, it's a reworking of ScholarOne. Gateway provides researchers with a single view of their author and reviewer tasks across a given publisher's portfolio, which means that we are going to be shifting our user account structure from one account per journal to one account per publisher.
Scholar one gateway is also going to be natively integrated with all of the publisher's existing ScholarOne journals, meaning that gateway will act as a central access point to begin and complete submissions, to reply, to review invitations to overall manage your workload in a single place. And this is largely in response to the overall dislike of journals operating as these silos for many, many years.
So ultimately, the core value of gateway looks to really pull that all together to really make a big difference in improving the user experience. So we do have a couple of screenshots to share. So the first one here is the screenshot of the Scala one gateway dashboard. As you can see we've got a fresh look.
It's very clean. It's very, very little noise. We've got a side rail for navigation, much more modern design than our existing application. And we also have clear delineation of author and reviewer tasks, default organization of items that need action, items that don't and very clear calls to action that demonstrate what the next step is in the peer review cycle for that document.
The goal here was really to make the information on this page absolutely unmistakable, both for a better user experience and also to help reduce burden on editorial teams that may be flooded with researchers who are sending in queries asking about the information they're seeing on a given screen. So while the headline feature of gateway is that single view for a user, gateway is implemented per publisher, which means that we are able to offer a lot of flexibility on configuration and look and feel options in ways that we have not been able to do previously.
The intent is to allow publishers to really make gateway feel their own, and the way that we are helping them do that is that we have built in tons of customization options, even for our pilot version. We can place announcements and banners on the landing page. We can customize and style different guidelines and resources throughout the gateway application. And maybe most importantly, we've also built in schema to do look and feel color updates so that publishers can make updates to the UI that are consistent with their brand, their brand guidelines, again, ensuring that gateway truly is their own.
Every gateway implementation also includes a journal finder section, which includes a full list of journals for that publisher and publishers can customize what information appears for each journal, and make sure that they are empowering their authors to find the right one with the right information at the right time. Users can then browse that list, compare and contrast journals that they're interested in, and when they're ready, they can begin a submission right there on the spot due to the native integration between gateway and the legacy app.
So this is obviously a major, major area and move for us. And ScholarOne, we're very, very excited about this. I do want to mention that it is not quite widely available yet for our broader customer base. We are currently in a closed beta testing period with a few very generous publishers who have offered to be our Guinea pigs and our early adopters. So as we run this closed beta testing period, which is basically a pilot, we will be spending the next few months gathering feedback, doing user interviews, and basically iterating accordingly on all of that data before we look to expand it more broadly to our customer base.
So switching gears. Josh had just mentioned that one of the things that we're working on this year as well is ensuring that we make it much easier to do a plug and play for different partners and third party vendors that our customers are interested in bringing into their peer review cycles. So that is exactly what we're doing.
We are going to be ramping up capabilities for integrating with external tools and services. There are a ton of new tools, a ton of cool new tools on the market right now. All of them know geared toward solving specific publisher needs, some of them quite niche, and being able to plug those tools directly into the scholar. One workflow is really how you're going to maximize the most value from them.
But historically, that hasn't always been an easy task, with ScholarOne usually taking quite a long time to stand up an integration, and with limitations around what we can and can't support from a technical standpoint. So to that end, we knew that we had to make some improvements and pay some attention to this area, really to make it much faster to integrate with a third party tool in ScholarOne and then be able to scale it accordingly and maybe offer it out more broadly.
And so this is what scholar ScholarOne really was built to achieve. Relay is our new solution for supporting robust and scalable integrations in ScholarOne. It is an API layer that enables a two way directional for data, meaning that ScholarOne can now ingest and display information from external sources and third party vendors when previously our capabilities only covered the outbound flow of data.
But now we'll be able to really maximize and enhance the utility of lots of third party solutions right there in our workflows to help our customers stay competitive, to make sure that they have the right enhancements in the peer review workflow that they want at the right time. So the initial use case that inspired relay was around the research integrity space, tons of new tools and tons of tools on the market in the research integrity space, and tons of eyes on the research integrity space, on how to improve quality screening and make sure that we're monitoring for bad actors and all the other ways that people take advantage of the peer review lifecycle for their own benefit.
So the intent was to start figuring out how to corral all of the different research integrity tools in the market, getting them working with ScholarOne data, packaging them nicely in the UI, and then that way that will empower editorial teams with the right data embedded at the right place in the workflow relay will ultimately go beyond research integrity initiatives as well.
In addition to enabling the two way data flow, it also supports faster and easier integration builds, which means that we can try out and test out the efficacy of various tools in our product. With speed, making faster decisions about what is worth scaling and pursuing further, and maybe what isn't quite working. So similar to ScholarOne, gateway relay is not quite ready for broad use yet, but we are kicking off a pilot specifically aimed at research integrity tools with a few of our customers.
That pilot is kicking off pretty much around right now. Our first round of partners are signals, clear skies, cactus and the SDM integrity hub. So all the heavy hitters. But ultimately we're going to be wanting to take a sky's the limit approach with this new capability. Scholar one's existing infrastructure has excellent workflow support, and bringing in third party partners will only enhance and support the peer review lifecycle exactly how our publishers need it to.
So I'm going to hand it back to Josh. But if you want to talk gateway or relay further at any point this week, come find us at the booth. I'm happy to do a demo of gateway. Like I said, we're very excited about these upcoming product changes, and we'll be happy to talk to you about it whenever you'd like. So thank you.
Almost ready to clap. Yeah we'll have a few minutes for questions. Last thing I wanted to talk about is I. I'm not here to pitch you on a new AI product that we've got ready to launch that you guys can buy right now. This is about the future, though. AI is going to disrupt this space. It's going to provide huge advantages to publishers and platforms that adopt it.
And we want to be part of the leading edge of that exploration. Silverchair has a history of being at the leading edge. A couple years ago, they launched their Silverchair AI labs initiative to help their platform customers experiment with AI and their data and come up with novel ways to apply AI to the user interfaces that researchers and consumers were using to access their content.
And we're taking the same approach with ScholarOne. We want to take an experimental approach. We want to co-create different AI solutions and test out different ways that I can help improve the editorial workflow. And we're really focusing on our sweet spot, that workflow, that workflow with so many checks and so many different manual processes that really delay time to decision.
And how could we apply AI in the right way to be able to speed up that process. We're going to be collaborative about this. We're not taking a we're the only ones that can do this approach, just like we do with all the partnerships. We recently announced a partnership with humm, working with joint customers that are testing out alchemist review. Alchemist review shows a lot of promise to help address some of the areas that we think are most important for our customers to be thinking about.
But we also want to be able to test out other ways that I could be applied. Our own Silverchair AI lab team working with the Scala one team has spun up in Scala one AI Playground. It was recently announced on Tuesday so you can read more about it there. But this is a way that we're going to be able to start to rapidly iterate and experiment with our own customers.
About different AI use cases right in the Scala one workflow. We've already got a lineup of 20 publishers that have expressed interest. And we're going to be starting to that testing process in the coming weeks and months. We'll be opening that up and adding more publishers to that testing. And again, this is going to be a way that we can double track how I can be applied to the workflow.
So that brings us to the end. As Adrian said, we're at booth 301. Myself, Adrian and a team of people here from Silverchair to talk about what's going on, and we've got about four or five minutes for questions right now. If anyone has any. I think we've got a microphone in the middle that ideally you could ask the question from there.
Hi, Josh. Hey, Mark. I'm curious about relay as an integration framework or set of APIs. I'm not exactly sure how to think about that, but how long has it been in development and is it informed by and compatible with Silverchair APIs.
So it's completely separate from Silverchair APIs, but it's part of the suite of APIs that ScholarOne has around it. So we've got a really robust set of APIs to get information out that's been available since 2017. And we've continued to build on that. It's the same set of APIs, but this is now an API to push information back into ScholarOne. So really what it's going to do essentially is we're going to have different use cases that it can support.
So we'll expect different data back in the API. The package that we get from an external party. And we'll do different things in ScholarOne with that. So just as an example the research integrity use case, we're going to be getting, we've got four different vendors that are going to be sending us similar packages. They ran a test on this paper. They got the full text. They sent it back.
Here's the alerts that they want to flag. They'll be able to customize what the alerts are within a message. But we're going to do things in the application raise the banner on the manuscript within the editorial workflow. If a flag comes in, allow a direct link out to the full report along with the blurb that the integrator sends us.
So it's going to be essentially a way that we can just replicate and create new use cases. That relay will support that. Anyone that's trying to cover that use case can start to use in the future. So yeah. Thank you. Yeah hi. Greg Fagan from aptara.
So do you have ScholarOne at the peer review end and the Silverchair platform at the publication end. When you're talking about interoperability, are you talking about plugging into publishers workflows, all those steps in between those two things. The million dollar question. Yeah I mean, this is an area that we think there's a lot of interest. We've heard a lot of interest from our publishing customers about how we can help to bridge that gap from the submission and peer review system to the publishing platform.
I think right now we don't have any specific plans that we can talk about right now, but it is an area that we're exploring. We think that some of these other near-term areas that we're focused on have the most pressing need for our customers. While we think about that longer term plan for what a joint ScholarOne plus Silverchair could be, I do think that how we can plug information into those platforms is going to be a use case where we're going to support pretty quickly, especially sharing information with those production systems and publishing platforms, but also getting information back in.
Scholar one was it published. Was it retracted, that sort of thing. So we do see that sort of information sharing happening. It's just not on our next six to nine month roadmap. Thank you. We have time for one more question. If anyone has any. Oh, good.
Here I am. Hi, Josh. Yes so the AI sandbox IEEE, as you can imagine, has a lot of internal expertise in all things AI and ML. How did you choose the 20 customers and did we say no. I don't know who's on the list. I will let you know. It's not a specific clause.
I'm pretty sure IEEE is on there, but we've got how it was chosen. We had our editor experience working group, so I mentioned that we've got working groups that are running talking about specific topics. And the product manager in charge of that I initiative started talking about this, and we got an initial list of publishers from that working group that wanted to be involved.
So we haven't closed the door on that. We would absolutely love to talk more about involvement for many of our customers. So we will. And this is not going to be this is going to be opening up quickly about that exploration with customers. Because I have a whole committee of volunteers working on coming up with AI projects for us.
Perfect yeah, perfect. All right. We are at time again. Thanks, everyone so much for joining your first session here. And we'll see you at SSP this week.
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