Chicago Startup Scholastica Disrupts Academic Publishing
CHICAGO, June 19, 2012 -- Scholastica, a publishing platform for scholarly journals, gives power back to the academic community by allowing new and existing journals to manage article submissions and publish their Open Access (OA) content without the need for expensive contracts with large academic publishing companies.
The cloud-based software service, created by graduate students from the University of Chicago, lowers the barriers to entry for creating a scholarly journal by giving academics across disciplines all the infrastructure they need to manage and publish a journal, from accepting publications to managing the peer review process to making decisions to publishing their content online.
Tim Gowers, Cambridge mathematician and Fields Medal winner as well as chief instigator of the Cost of Knowledge boycott against the academic publishing giant Elsevier, remarked about Scholastica on his blog, "…what one can say now, with confidence, is that there is a web tool out there [Scholastica] that makes the mechanics of starting up a new (but secretly not so new) journal almost trivial."
"Journals of all sizes, and in all disciplines, should have access to top-notch software without needing to sign expensive contracts with the huge corporate publishers," says Co-Founder and Lead Designer of Scholastica, Rob Walsh. "Right now, most software to manage and publish a journal is expensive and aimed only at a few specific fields – and Scholastica changes all of that." Scholastica's pricing model scales by number of submissions, so large journals and small journals get the same great features and pay according to their submission volume.
"Our mission is to put control over scholarly publishing back in the hands of scholars, rather than the large corporate publishers. Whether your journal is single blind, double blind, or even triple blind, Scholastica works for you." says Co-Founder and CEO, Brian Cody, commenting on the variety of journal configuration options available that allow journals in the social sciences, humanities, law reviews, and natural sciences to use Scholastica.
