Silverchair’s mission is to change the world for the better by empowering creators and users of scholarly and professional knowledge to maximize their positive impact on humanity. Consistent with this mission, we are committed to the positive impact we have on our employees, our clients, our community, and the world. Below we highlight some of the ways we have put that corporate responsibility into action.
Environmental Responsibility
At Silverchair we aim to minimize our environmental footprint through a variety of ethical, economical, and efficient practices, including:
- Sustainable Office Practices: Silverchair is now a remote-first organization, which reduces carbon emissions by allowing employees to work from home regardless of the location. We also maintain a headquarters office space located on the downtown pedestrian mall in Charlottesville, Virginia, where we offer healthy, locally sourced food and drink options. We support our planet by striving for more efficient operations, cutting disposables, packaging, and waste. We are continuously working toward a zero-waste office through recycling, an active composting program, and reusable kitchenware.
Support for Renewable Energy: As a SaaS company with a remote-first culture, our energy use primarily takes the shape of cloud processing & servers. Our primary partners, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft 365 Suite, have defined renewable energy efforts.
- Paperless Operations: Our fully digital work processes (paperless finance, contract, and administrative practices) mean less physical waste and resources.
Sustainable Events
The global halt in business travel due to the pandemic drastically reduced carbon emissions and highlights the environmental impact of in-person events. As such, we are committed to ensuring that the events we host build community without simultaneously tearing down the environment. Some of the efforts we make to that end include:
- Digital materials to reduce paper waste
- Sustainable swag & food/drink packaging
- Booking room blocks within walking distance of all venues
- Using local businesses for all food, drink, & materials
- Green venues: for example, our recent in-person events were held at The Eaton Workshop, LEED Gold rated and the first urban regenerative hotel meeting Regenerative Travel’s social & environmental standards
- Carbon offsetting of travel for all attendees via COTAP (Carbon Offsets to Alleviate Poverty)
Community
Now more than ever, the communities we are part of play a vital role in our continued success and quality of life. That’s why we work to intentionally foster our communities through active engagement.
Closest to home is our employee community (termed “Silverchairians”), which we continuously build through regular companywide touchpoints, 1:1 connections opportunities through CoffeePals, a company culture & advocacy group, and more. We maintain a Culture Code that defines the non-policy aspects of our culture that make us who we are. One aspect of this culture is our commitment to radical transparency, which also extends to our engagement with our clients.
Silverchair’s client community enjoys the collective benefit of shared ideas, action, and collaboration, particularly in charting out future functionalities and integrations. Efforts to build community among clients include: Publisher Working Groups, our transparent Platform Development Request process, virtual and in-person client events, and a client-only portal that offers a plethora of resources, including a consultant directory, blogs, and more. Silverchair’s recent acquisition of ScholarOne has meant extending our renowned community-building efforts to the ScholarOne community. Read more about those efforts here.
Within scholarly publishing, Silverchair is a member of numerous industry organizations, working groups, and initiatives, actively building relationships and working with partners to improve our publishing community. We actively serve on boards and committees and are a regular supporter of the SSP Generations Fund, which provides sustainable funding for SSP’s Fellowship, Mentoring, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. In 2017, we formed the Silverchair Universe, a partner network of complementary industry vendors. We also host our own industry event, Platform Strategies, which brings together leaders to discuss the strategies driving publishing technologies.
All of these efforts are designed to convene our communities to the benefit of all.
Accessibility
Digital knowledge should be for everyone. Silverchair has prioritized accessibility for decades, having designed, developed, and hosted federal government sites that legally required 508 Compliance. Today, AA WCAG 2.1 compliance is instilled into our platforms’ codebases and is tested for in every new line of code.
As a strategic partner to the publishers and societies who partner with us, we prioritize delivering guidance and resources to our client community, beyond simply equipping them with compliant platforms. Silverchair’s processes and roadmap are geared toward breaking down barriers to entry on all our products, propelling our clients’ content to greater reach and impact.
Security
Silverchair maintains an ISO 27001:2022 Certified Information Security Management System (ISMS) that governs all use and storage of client data within our internal systems and platform. The policies encompass Organizational Security, Asset Classification, Personnel Security, Communications and Operations Management, Access Control, Systems Development and Maintenance, Information Security Incident Management, Compliance, and Security Warranty.
Additionally, Silverchair is certified compliant with Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council’s requirements for data protection. Though we do not handle any credit card information whatsoever, we are a gateway that redirects traffic to external sites that do handle client credit card information. For this reason, we maintain PCI compliance as part of our corporate commitment to security.
Employee Wellness
Silverchair is committed to supporting our team members not just as employees through professional development and role support, but also as whole people. This mindset is built into everything our company does, and includes wellness-focused communications, benefits offerings, corporate memberships, and more.
To help promote wellness, Silverchair provides employees with a free subscription to Calm, an app for meditation and mental fitness. We continuously explore benefit options that support the health and wellbeing of our people and encourage appropriate home office setup according to ergonomic guidelines.
As documented in our Culture Code, we balance work-life flexibility with accountability, empowering our people to care for themselves and their teams in the ways that best suit them. Our remote-first environment allows for flexibility in work hours to meet individual needs. We also support Focus Fridays, where we discourage scheduling meetings on Fridays to allow uninterrupted time for heads-down and creative work.
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
As a company that aims to innovate to improve the creation, distribution, and impact of scientific knowledge, our commitment to diversity and inclusion is rooted in the creation of a space for the intelligent, informed, and civil exchange of contrasting thoughts and ideas. That is, in order to deliver optimal value, we must attract and give voice to a wide variety of perspectives, including those from divergent functional, cultural, and social backgrounds and experiences.