In this interview we learn more about Scholastica, an OASPA member in the Infrastructure & Services category.
All views expressed are those of the interviewee and not of OASPA.
Q. Tell us a bit about your organisation and the service it provides – and your role within it.
Hello! I’m Brian Cody, CEO and co-founder of Scholastica, a scholarly journal publishing technology company based in Chicago that offers modern, easy-to-integrate software and services for peer review management, article production, and Open Access journal hosting. At Scholastica, we pride ourselves on providing powerful and intuitive software solutions designed to help small and medium publishers streamline their operations and sustainably meet the latest industry standards so they can further their missions.
Scholastica has been around for over ten years now. We’re proud to work with 1,200+ journals, the vast majority of which are published by academic organizations, including some amazing open access journals run by university presses and scholarly associations like the University of California Press, Penn Press, the Mississippi State Medical Association, RTI International, and the Association of Child Life Professionals. We also work with many great scholar-led journals, including Diamond Open Access journals across STEM, the humanities, law, and the social sciences.
Q. Why did you decide to join OASPA and what do you hope to get out of your OASPA membership?
We decided to join OASPA because it became clear that doing so would help further Scholastica’s mission to empower small and medium journal teams to peer review, produce, and disseminate top-quality research more efficiently and affordably than traditional options. The transition to Open Access brings new challenges for journal publishers, and we felt that joining and supporting OASPA was paramount to ensuring our team at Scholastica stays abreast of the latest OA publishing news, standards, and best practices. OASPA’s network of mission-driven OA publishers and service providers is exactly the kind of community we want to be an active part of!
As a technology company, we hope our OASPA membership will help us meet more service providers so we can collaborate on best practices for OA-related integrations and emerging metadata standards. And we hope it will help us connect with scholarly publishing organizations that may be able to benefit from our solutions as well as the free publishing resources Scholastica creates for the community. We care about being an industry partner, not just a vendor people know of.
Q. How is your organization demonstrating its commitment to making globally equitable participation in open scholarly communication a reality?
A big part of Scholastica’s mission is lowering the cost of scholarly publishing to help promote a sustainable research future. We believe that this will help facilitate more equitable access to academic journals.
Scholastica works with a wide range of mission-driven organizations globally — from larger publishers, like UC Press, to scholarly societies publishing in-house, like the National Society of Black Engineers, to individual scholar-led journals, like Discrete Analysis and Precision Nanomedicine. Both of those journals are funded via institutional grants and subsidies. A group of scholars actually started PRNANO to introduce a more affordable OA publishing option in its field and it later became the official publication of the European Foundation for Clinical Nanomedicine. We’re proud Scholastica’s solutions are helping academy-led journals operate sustainably and that we get to be a partner to our customers and amplify the work they’re doing — our mission is really to further their missions.
One of the key ways we’re making quality publishing easier and more affordable is helping journals collect and generate rich, standards-aligned metadata for articles without technical hassles (especially PIDs) and import it into discovery services like Crossref and the DOAJ. Standardized metadata supports research discovery, transparency, and interoperability across the scholarly ecosystem. Most recently, we integrated all Scholastica solutions with ROR. We now automatically apply ROR IDs to institutions when authors input them into our peer review submission form and when editors add them to any articles they send to Scholastica’s production service or publish via our OA hosting platform. Our CTO, Cory Schires, also did a case study interview with ROR on our implementation process to provide pointers for others looking to do the same.
At a past Peer Review Week webinar, we discussed how the metadata associated with research outputs directly informs scholars’ apparent identities online and levels of representation. When metadata is missing or messy, it can result in some researchers’ contributions being less discoverable and recognized. On the flip side, when research outputs have rich metadata, they become easier to link and find, creating opportunities for diverse research to have broader impacts and helping to surface collaboration opportunities among scholars from all walks of life. The richer and more interconnected metadata is, the more diverse, equitable, and inclusive the scholarly communication ecosystem will become. Of course, these kinds of technical standards can be challenging for small publishers to implement, and that’s where we are working to help.
Q. What do you think are the main challenges for funders and institutions to overcome to better incentivise open publishing practices as a positive contribution to career development?
To encourage open publishing practices, I think funders can continue to launch and promote OA publishing mandates as a requirement for funding. And I support funders strengthening these requirements in time to put teeth into OA mandates. I know monitoring, compliance, and research relationships are all challenges for funders looking to implement OA mandates, and rolling these out over many years is a way to manage the short-term growing pains with the long-term OA-positive outcomes we all want.
Of course, it’s also imperative that funders and academic institutions provide small and medium academy journal publishers with the support of funding and resources they need to thrive in the emerging OA landscape. And I think we’re starting to see that with initiatives from cOAlition S and the UNESCO Open Science Toolkit.
I also think funders can continue to consider caps on their APC contributions to incentivize efficient cost management and help minimize high APCs that exacerbate global inequities due to differing levels of economic privilege among authors and their institutions.
On the institutional front, I’ve written in the past about the need for researcher education about the importance of Open Access and the need for tenure-related reforms, so OA publishing is acknowledged, required, and incentivized in tenure packets, especially at institutions that over-emphasize traditional (and problematic) journal impact factors.
Q. How do you think OASPA can help mitigate those challenges?
First, I want to give a shout-out to OASPA’s great webinars and, of course, the annual conference for helping build a knowledgeable stakeholder community equipped to address these challenges. I also want to give a HUGE thanks to OASPA for posting the conference session recordings and links to slides going back years – it’s truly a treasure trove of information supporting the Open Access transition.
I think OASPA can help by continuing to share best practices and emerging models for OA-related strategies, which is so crucial because we’re all looking for tools to use and examples to follow! OASPA can also help by continuing to connect like-minded publishers, service providers, and other key stakeholders working to make sustainable and equitable OA a reality. Having people we know and trust to chat about ideas and strategic plans or pilot new projects with is a HUGE resource that takes a ton of effort to cultivate. OASPA is uniquely positioned to help foster this growing community, and we’re so happy to be part of it!
