At Scholastica, we work hard to make our software as convenient and user-friendly as it can be. This past month has been no exception, with a host of new features and improvements. Here’s the latest on how Scholastica is making your user-experience even better:
Hide a manuscript from an editor. Occasionally, an editor of your journal may be connected to a submission in a way that could cause a conflict of interest - maybe they’re a co-author of the submission or work closely with one of the manuscript’s authors. In any case, you can now hide one or multiple manuscripts from any journal editor (other than the admin). When a manuscript is hidden from an editor, that editor will no longer be able to see: the hidden manuscript listed among the journal’s submissions, the hidden manuscript’s reviewers or their reviews, or discussion messages relating to the hidden manuscript.
Review due dates now specify the time. You’ve always been able to specify due dates for the review requests you send, but now you can also more clearly state the exact time by which you need the review submitted. So if you’re in California and you need a review submitted by 5PM PT, you no longer have to worry about someone in Chicago submitting their manuscript 3 hours too late at 5PM CDT. Reviewers in different timezones will see the review deadline you set in their timezone.
See the number of replies in a discussion. The discussions feature has proven popular, which we’re glad to see. To make it easier to keep track of messages, we’ve added a count of the replies in each thread and made it easier to see who sent the message when you get a notification in your email inbox.
- Save review progress. Writing something as long and complex as a review of an academic paper in a browser can be a risky task. If you’ve ever lost something you were working on by accidentally hitting the back button or closing a tab, you’ll be glad to know that we now save your reviews as you write them. Reviews still won’t be submitted until you hit the submit button at the bottom of the page, but now while you’re working on a review, you can feel at ease if you need to (or accidentally) refresh the page, go back to a previous page, or even close your browser. Everything you’ve written will be there when you come back to the review!
- Reviews table. On the reviewers tab for a manuscript, we’ve added a separate table for submitted reviews to help you spot them more easily. Each reviewer you’ve invited will automatically be listed in the Invited Reviewers table and now, once some of your reviewers have submitted reviews, you will see each one listed in the Submitted Reviews table. Reviewers who submit reviews will automatically be given a reference number (Reviewer 1, 2, 3, etc.) so that you can refer to them anonymously in your decision letters to authors. If you allow authors to see portions of reviews, they will see the same anonymous reference numbers on each review that the reviews have been assigned in the Submitted Reviews table.
