Our acquisition of ScholarOne deepens our commitment to scholarly publishing and our goal of being the best technology partner in the market. In this post I’ll share a bit more about our vision for the “new Silverchair” and how our platforms and services can help publishers solve some of their greatest content, technology, workflow, and monetization challenges.
Our Commitment to the Community
This acquisition is not just about expanding our business; it's about investing in core technology infrastructure to strengthen scholarly communications and improving, rather than disrupting, peer review and publisher content workflows. We’ll do this by focusing on our community of over 600 publishers. We’re committed to a collaborative, transparent, and purposeful integration of ScholarOne into Silverchair, and understanding our clients’ missions, needs, and product strategies.We understand the importance of maintaining business continuity, keeping existing projects and key contacts stable, and, most importantly, the value of seeking continuous feedback from our publisher community. We’ve always said that everything we do must help our publishers make money, save money, or fulfill their missions. This remains true.
Why This Matters
Acquiring ScholarOne was a strategic investment. The “new Silverchair” will build on the strengths of the combined organization to create more robust, sustainable, and independent infrastructure for the publishing community. With the ScholarOne platform at the start of many publishers’ content workflows and the Silverchair Platform at the end, we’re now in a unique position to help publishers solve their submission, peer-review, research integrity, content workflow, content hosting, productization, and monetization challenges. We’ll do this by investing in our key platforms, by developing new features and services, and by enabling integrations or partnerships for our clients.Here's why this matters:
- Growth with Integrity: As we expand our capabilities, we’ll remain a trusted partner committed to integrity and the responsible evolution of scholarly publishing. Silverchair has invested in relationships and delivered innovation and technology solutions at scale for more than 30 years. We’re bringing this know-how to the submission and peer review space.
- Strategic Investment: By bringing together two leading publishing technology platforms, we are poised to improve integrity, trust, transparency, and the overall user experience across the research lifecycle.
- Efficiency at Scale: The combined services of Silverchair and ScholarOne will forge a more powerful infrastructure that can streamline and simplify publishing processes, as well as user analytics and data capture.
What our clients can expect
Our approach to integration is and will continue to be community-driven. We're building robust platforms that serve our extensive publisher community with care and attention to detail. The integration of ScholarOne into Silverchair will be:- Gradual: Ensuring that we evaluate every step carefully to maintain the quality and reliability of existing services.
- Transparent: Communicating openly with our community at each stage of the integration.
- Collaborative: Engaging with our publishers and users to understand and incorporate their needs and feedback. We believe in flexible and configurable workflows, responsive support resources, helpful analytics, and tools that adapt to the changing publishing environment and that meet our clients’ needs.
- Continued feature development and investments in core platform infrastructure and non-functional requirements
- An extension of the Silverchair Platform’s client-led product development
- A service culture that is dedicated to modernizing and improving research workflows
Looking Forward: Innovation with Purpose
We're not just thinking about the integration now —we're designing features and workflows that will power the future of scholarly communication. We see our jobs as helping publishers deliver science and scholarship to the world. We’re committed to doing this in a user-centric and community-grounded way. We’ll leverage our platforms and innovative technologies to help publishers with research integrity, applying artificial intelligence where it makes sense, new product development, or making their workflows more efficient and cost effective.We will keep you updated as we progress on this exciting journey. Our development roadmap will concentrate on modernizing user experiences, enhancing accessibility, ensuring research integrity, and harnessing automation, generative AI, and machine learning to augment the human experts that are essential to our peer review and publishing processes. We’ll also look for ways to reduce the time publishers spend on low-value activities to help them free up dollars for innovation, modernization, or to improve strategic outcomes.
Silverchair thrives when our publishers do. That’s why we continue to champion a diverse and growing publishing ecosystem. As we look ahead to 2025 and beyond, our promise remains to provide essential platforms and technology resources that empower authors, publishers, and the broader market. We’ll do this by collaborating with our clients and partners, with transparency, and by innovating.
We’re just getting started, and we hope you’ll join us.