Scholastica’s open access publishing platform features a website template designed specifically for academic journals that is desktop and mobile-friendly. You choose the images, colors, layout, and branding for your website, and even a custom domain. You can sign up for a demo here - read on for full details!
What options do scholarly journals currently have for great website hosting and design? The way we see it, not too many. Journals can either:
- Find an external developer to build a website — this can be expensive and lead to journals settling for outdated functionality and design down the road (we’ve all seen this!)
- Use a mainstream website builder like WordPress — this can be a more affordable option, but still requires quite a bit of technical setup and doesn’t offer many journal-specific templates
- Enlist a tech savvy volunteer to build a website — this often leads to the site not being maintained properly once the volunteer moves on
- Stick with just a page on a publisher or institution website — this gives journals little to no ability to update their website design and highlight new content
Do you fall into any of the above categories, and are you unhappy with your journal’s current website design?
A shared frustration that we’ve heard from many journal publishers is that they don’t have the resources to maintain modern journal websites, so they settle for mediocre ones. At Scholastica, we believe that all journals should be able to have a beautiful, user-friendly, and functional website - so we developed a website template to make that possible. Scholastica’s open access publishing platform features a journal website template that journals can customize to meet their publication needs.
With Scholastica’s website template, journals can upload their own header image and article images, choose website colors to reflect their branding, and create custom article sections. Journals can also publish from a custom website domain without worrying about hosting - Scholastica will handle that for you!
Here’s a look at Scholastica’s journal website template.
A look at Scholastica’s journal website template
Scholastica’s journal website template makes it possible for journals in any discipline to showcase their content on a beautiful website at an affordable price. Publishing teams can set up and customize their journal websites in minutes right on Scholastica using a simple editor tool. Below are examples of Scholastica’s journal website template:
What does Scholastica’s website template include?
We’ve built Scholastica’s journal website template to have all of the features that journals need to publish online including:
- A beautiful homepage that showcases all of the latest articles
- Article sections so editors can categorize content by topic to help readers find articles faster
- Mobile-friendly design so readers can easily access journal websites on the go
- Built-in blog functionality so journals can easily start a blog from Scholastica at any time
- Site-wide search functionality
How does Scholastica’s website template differ from other website builders?
Designated Website Template for Journals
A challenge for many journal teams when designing publication websites is that there aren’t a ton of user-friendly examples out there to work from. For journals that enlist an outside designer or opt to use a generic website builder like WordPress, it can be easy to fall into old patterns and model their website off of printed issues. This is a big no-no! Readers interact with content differently online and your website should reflect that. A primary benefit of Scholastica’s website template is that we’ve designed it specifically for online academic journals. Our journal websites have easy navigation so authors, reviewers, and readers can quickly find where they need to go. Scholastica’s template showcases journals’ latest publications from the homepage and makes it easy for visitors to skim through articles and issues.
Google Scholar indexing support
Google Scholar is a free and convenient search engine that academics worldwide use to conduct research. While you may assume that your articles will be indexed by Google Scholar, since Google automatically indexes most web pages, that isn’t the case. Journals must follow specific guidelines to be eligible for inclusion in Google Scholar, which can be a time-consuming and technical process. Recognizing this, we’re working to help journals get indexed in Google Scholar. Scholastica’s journal website template is structured to meet Google Scholar’s indexing criteria. And we automatically generate HTML metadata for all articles to make it easier for Google Scholar to find and crawl them.
Mobile-friendly Design
Today most websites are mobile-friendly and your journal website should be too. Making your website mobile-friendly will not only give your readers a better experience by allowing them to browse your site from smartphones and tablets, but will also improve your site’s search engine ranking as mobile-readiness is one of Google’s key webpage ranking signals. Scholastica’s website template has a mobile-friendly design by default so there’s no need for extra work on your part. Just sign up for Scholastica Open Access Publishing, customize your website template to your liking, and start publishing desktop and mobile-friendly content in minutes.
Part of a Complete Journal Management Platform
One struggle many editorial teams face is trying to balance their time between different online platforms. Some journals use separate tools for submissions, peer review, publishing, and their website. This can be a lot to manage and can lead to publishers updating journal websites less frequently than is ideal. Scholastica’s open access publishing platform is integrated with our peer review software, so your journal can choose to accept manuscripts, coordinate peer review, and publish all on Scholastica. Move manuscripts seamlessly from peer review to publication and save time!
This post was originally published on October 26, 2016 and updated on October 9, 2017.
