ScholarOne

ScholarOne
Name	ScholarOne
Type	Proprietary software
Industry	Scholarly publishing
Owner	Clarivate
Founded	1997
Headquarters	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

ScholarOne

ScholarOne is a proprietary web-based manuscript submission and peer review management platform used by publishers, societies, and academic institutions to handle manuscript workflows. It provides tools for submission intake, peer reviewer selection, editorial decision tracking, and production handoffs, integrating with indexing and citation services. The platform has been adopted across a range of scholarly fields and is incorporated into publishing operations alongside systems from other major vendors.

Overview

ScholarOne offers modules for manuscript submission, peer review coordination, and production transfer, targeting participants such as editors, reviewers, authors, and production staff. It competes in a market shared with providers used by publishers like Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis Group, and Association for Computing Machinery. The platform interfaces with metadata and identifier authorities including CrossRef, ORCID, PubMed Central, Scopus, and Web of Science to facilitate discoverability and indexing. Large learned societies such as American Chemical Society, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Royal Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Medical Association have historically used comparable submission systems in managing journals like Nature, Science (journal), The Lancet, Cell (journal), and Journal of the American Medical Association. ScholarOne supports multilingual output and can be configured for journals publishing in languages represented in databases like SciELO, EMBASE, and Directory of Open Access Journals.

History

The platform originated in the late 1990s amid the transition from paper-based editorial workflows to online manuscript management, contemporaneous with systems developed at organizations such as Blackwell Publishing, SAGE Publishing, and Kluwer Academic Publishers. Over time, acquisitions and consolidations in the scholarly publishing industry involving entities like Thomson Reuters, Clarivate Analytics, and ProQuest influenced ownership structures for manuscript management tools. Milestones in the platform's evolution paralleled developments in persistent identifiers and indexing, including implementations tied to Digital Object Identifier registration via CrossRef and researcher identification through ORCID. Regulatory and ethical frameworks such as guidance from Committee on Publication Ethics and standards referenced by bodies like International Committee of Medical Journal Editors shaped features for conflict-of-interest disclosure and reporting. The platform's development responded to emergent needs highlighted by events in scholarly communication, including debates following the Sokal affair, reproducibility discussions after publications in PLOS ONE, and policy shifts influenced by funders such as the Wellcome Trust and the National Institutes of Health.

Features and Functionality

Core features include submission intake forms, automated reviewer invitation workflows, manuscript versioning, and decision and approval tracking suitable for journals across disciplines represented by publishers such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, MIT Press, Princeton University Press, and Columbia University Press. Integration-ready APIs enable linkage with performance and analytics services like Altmetric and indexing aggregators such as Google Scholar and Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science. Tools for plagiarism screening connect to providers like Turnitin and iThenticate, while metadata export supports standards used by repositories including Figshare and Dryad (repository). The interface supports customizable submission templates tailored to journal titles such as The BMJ, PNAS, Journal of Clinical Oncology, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and ACM Transactions on Graphics.

Workflow and User Roles

The system delineates roles common in editorial workflows: managing editors, associate editors, reviewers, authors, and production editors, similar to role distinctions found at editorial offices for journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet Oncology, Nature Neuroscience, Cell Metabolism, and Journal of the American Chemical Society. Features enable assignment and escalation policies, automated reminders aligned with best practices promoted by organisations like COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), and audit trails for decisions relevant to disputes and appeals processed under policies from institutions including Harvard University, Stanford University, and University of Oxford. Reviewer databases and identity verification mechanisms draw on infrastructures used by Publons and author-identification services like ORCID.

Integration and Compatibility

ScholarOne is designed to interoperate with production systems and industry services used by publishers and vendors such as Cenveo, PubMed, CrossRef, ORCID, Scopus, and Web of Science. It supports metadata schemas and export formats compatible with aggregators and indexing services employed by libraries at institutions like Library of Congress, British Library, Harvard Library, and National Library of Medicine. Single sign-on, authentication, and access integrations align with standards implemented in infrastructures like Shibboleth, SAML, and identity management used by consortia including Jisc and ORCID. The platform's APIs and XML feeds facilitate downstream production and hosting with partners such as HighWire Press and platform providers used by publishers including Project MUSE.

Adoption and Criticism

Adoption spans commercial publishers, society publishers, and university presses including entities like Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, American Society for Microbiology, International Mathematical Union, and IEEE publications. Criticisms commonly raised in discourse alongside critiques of comparable systems from publishers like Elsevier and Springer Nature include usability concerns cited by editorial staff at institutions such as University College London and Max Planck Society, interoperability challenges raised by librarians at National Institutes of Health and European Commission funded projects, and debates over vendor lock-in referenced in discussions involving SPARC and COAR. Ongoing community debates reference transparency and workflow flexibility issues highlighted in forums attended by stakeholders from Wellcome Trust, Gates Foundation, and academic steering groups at Digital Science.

Category:Academic publishing software