AI has the potential to help speed up and simplify various aspects of scholarly publishing, and the Scholastica team is here for that!
As new opportunities emerge to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) in publishing processes, we’re exploring ways to thoughtfully incorporate AI value into our solutions. We began by using AI to enhance Scholastica’s single-source production service and have now started carefully considering customer-facing AI features for our other products. In these efforts, our focus is always on finding ways to increase publishing efficiency without compromising research ethics or quality.
Below is a quick roundup of some of our latest AI-supported features and the benefits.
New AI article lede composition tool
Starting with our newest AI feature, we’ve added an automatic lede composition option to the article creation form for Scholastica’s production service and open access journal hosting platform to help editors save time.
When a user clicks the “draft lede button” shown above, we leverage a Large Language Model (LLM) model to automatically scan the article for key information and generate an engaging lede within the 30-character limit. The user can then review and update the draft lede as needed before proceeding to the next step. We encourage editors to always closely check AI-generated text, as it may contain errors (think of the AI as a writing tool, not a perfect scribe!).
AI support for article typesetting and layout
In recent years, Scholastica’s team has also been incorporating AI features into our proprietary single-source production service software to increasingly automate layout and typesetting steps, so authors and editors don’t have to worry about pre-formatting manuscripts in a specific way. For example, we’re using Machine Learning (ML) to automatically identify manuscript elements and place them in the correct location within PDF and HTML articles, such as citations and figure captions within Word documents.
We also use AI to automate citation formatting in journals’ desired styles, so authors and editors don’t have to worry about providing perfect references or waiting for manual citation cleanup. In fact, we can automatically update citations provided in any format to any of the major citation styles Scholastica supports (e.g., convert APA citations to Chicago style).
Scholastica’s production service team generates PDF, HTML, and JATS XML articles from original DOCX or LaTeX manuscript files simultaneously via our software-based process. You can learn more about our production service in this on-demand webinar.
Article citation enrichment
Scholastica’s production service also enriches article citation data with the help of ML, where possible. For example, our system parses all the citations in an article during typesetting to identify ones that are missing available DOIs. We then automatically add DOI URLs to the citations if discovered.
The benefits of adding DOI links to references are many, as explained by Crossref here, including making it easier for readers to trace source materials and draw connections between different pieces of research. It’s a critical but often overlooked step in publishing, as manually updating reference links is a tedious task. By leveraging AI, we’re helping journals get that value with no extra work.
We also add PubMed, PubMed Central, and Google Scholar links to the citations of HTML articles hosted via Scholastica’s OA publishing platform, as applicable, for further citation enrichment. Additionally, this supports search engine optimization, as linking newly published articles to other online content helps search engine crawlers know when to include them in search results. Academic articles tend to have very few links in the body text, so this step can make a big difference.
Looking towards the future
Behind the scenes, we’re continuing to seek opportunities to leverage AI to enhance the efficiency of Scholastica’s software and services, such as the production use cases above. As we do, we remain committed to protecting our customers’ data and content in line with our privacy policy. To that end, we want to note that no Scholastica user data will be used to (re)train third-party AI models.
Our team is also closely following opportunities for journal publishers to incorporate external AI-backed solutions into their workflows. We encourage you to reach out if you have any questions about potential integrations. Our feature development process is heavily based on requests, so we’d love to hear from you!
The more we can all leverage AI to automate tedious manual tasks without compromising human quality assurances and innovation, the more we can achieve. At Scholastica, that’s our aim and vision for the AI future.
We hope you found this feature roundup helpful! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
