Silverchair FAQs

We’ve served scholarly publishers since 1993 and launched the Silverchair Platform in 2010. In 2024, ScholarOne Manuscripts, which has supported peer review since 2000, and ScholarOne Conferences joined Silverchair, bringing together more than 30 years of experience across the publishing lifecycle.

We partner with scholarly societies and associations, university presses, commercial and professional publishers, government agencies, and academic medical centers, from single-journal societies to organizations serving hundreds of partners. More than 400 publishers host content on the Silverchair Platform, ScholarOne Manuscripts supports more than 10,000 journals, and more than 135 meetings a year use ScholarOne Conferences.

We’re an independent partner with no publishing operations or corporate parent, so our success is tied directly to our clients’ success, and every investment goes back into our products and client experience. Our roadmap is shaped with our client community, and our products support publishers from submission and peer review through hosting and discovery. But the real difference is our teams: we work collaboratively and strategically alongside publishers as true partners (just ask our clients!).

Silverchair is a privately held, independent company backed by Thompson Street Capital Partners, whose 2022 investment helped fund our acquisition of ScholarOne. We have no parent publisher, and our board is chaired by our founder, Thane Kerner.

Silverchair and ScholarOne were both founded in Charlottesville, Virginia, where we keep an office for client and partner meetings. Today we’re a fully remote team of more than 230 people across the US, Europe, and beyond, which helps us support clients across the globe.

Silverchair clients have access to a live product roadmap, which we are happy to walk prospective partners through during discussions. Our priorities are shaped with our community through advisory groups, working groups, and early-access pilot programs.

We maintain an ISO 27001:2022 certified information security program, are PCI compliant, and support compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other data protection regulations. Our platforms are cloud hosted on Microsoft Azure and AWS, with continuous monitoring, disaster recovery environments, and regular third-party audits and penetration testing.

Additionally, Silverchair maintains an internal offensive security function. Our red-teaming work includes ScholarOne and the Silverchair Platform. We use controlled adversarial testing in an isolated test environment to find and validate exploitable weaknesses and support remediation. The team seeks out weaknesses and tests whether they can be exploited, including whether individual weaknesses can combine into vulnerability chains with greater impact. The purpose is to establish what is exploitable, understand its potential impact, and help engineering teams decide what to address. 

This red-teaming is an ongoing, executive-sponsored program operating within an authorized scope. Testing beyond that scope requires explicit prior approval from senior technology or security leadership. The program reports its findings internally on a regular basis. Validated findings inform engineering prioritization and remediation, grounding decisions in demonstrated exploitability. We do not publish technical details that could enable misuse, and nothing contained here authorizes anyone to test Silverchair products or services. 

We use AI to augment human expertise, not replace it, and we test new capabilities with clients through the Silverchair AI Lab before they reach production. Publishers stay in control: no hosted content is used in AI tools without their explicit permission, and we only use AI services that don’t train future models on that content.

I have a question about my submission. Who should I contact? For questions about your manuscript’s status or a journal’s policies, please contact the journal’s editorial office. For technical issues, such as logging in or uploading files, visit the ScholarOne Support site for author guides and FAQs.

I’m trying to access content or discuss my data use. Who should I contact?

Please direct all access questions to your institution’s library or the publisher’s customer service team, as they manage access directly. Questions about reuse, permissions, or text and data mining should go to the publisher of the content.

I’m looking for usage stats or in need of help accessing subscribed content. Who do I contact?

Please contact the publisher whose content you subscribe to, as publishers manage their own subscriptions and customer service. Most publisher sites on our platform also offer an institutional account area where administrators can download COUNTER usage reports and, where the publisher allows, manage access settings such as IP ranges.

For questions about a review, or for assistance using ScholarOne, please contact the journal’s editorial office, since they know how your workflows are configured. For technical issues with your account, use the Help link on any ScholarOne page or visit the ScholarOne Support site for role-based guides, training, and FAQs.

We’d love to hear from you. Please use this contact form or email [email protected].

The Silverchair Platform is the technology that scholarly and professional publishers use to host, sell, and deliver their content online. It powers publisher websites for journals, books, and more, along with self-service tools for loading content, managing access, understanding usage, and distributing for aggregation and discovery.

The platform hosts journals, books, conference proceedings, multimedia, and standards, and our Composer authoring tool adds news, blogs, sponsored content, and other editorial formats. All of it can be searched together, packaged into products, and organized into collections that span formats.

Our flexible templates are designed to deliver best practices in UX design while reflecting each publisher’s unique brand identity. Each site is designed to reflect the publisher’s branding, and our self-service tools give staff direct control over pages, products, content, and access. When a need goes beyond configuration, our delivery teams can scope and build custom functionality.

Silverchair has experience integrating with many popular association management and CRM systems, including Personify, Salesforce, NetForum, and iMIS, and DOI registration with Crossref is handled as standard functionality. Standard integrations include ORCID, Crossref, PubMed, Google Scholar, COUNTER and SUSHI reporting, KBART, and institutional access options such as Shibboleth, OpenAthens, SeamlessAccess, and GetFTR.

Our Silverchair Universe partner program also offers ready-made integrations with dozens of best-in-class industry tools at no additional implementation cost. We’ve purposefully designed our platforms to be open and interoperable with authoring, discovery, and other publication-enhancing tools. We put the power of choice into our publishers’ hands to choose what services best fit their needs, enabling them to adapt to market changes, experiment, and find the best strategic partners.

A dedicated Silverchair build team leads every migration, and most projects take nine months to a year from kickoff to launch, depending on scope and content. On your side, we ask for a project lead who can commit part of their time, input from subject-matter experts during requirements, testing, and approvals, and technical help with integrations and launch. Explore our full migration guide and resources here.

Fathom, our analytics tool, delivers usage and search reporting through interactive Power BI dashboards, with direct data warehouse access available for teams that want to run their own analysis. Libraries get COUNTER 5.1 reports and SUSHI harvesting, audited annually, and we also support Google Analytics and other analytics tools.

Silverchair’s SCJATS (journals) and SCBITS (books) specifications are robust subsets of the JATS and BITS standards, not proprietary formats. They fully comply with these industry standards while offering greater specificity about which tags and attributes are supported for front-end display.  They also offer more scalable and efficient standard, with content displaying in a lightweight format that requires less processing and enables quicker transmission while improving interoperability, from bulk deposits to content collections.

We design the Silverchair Platform to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA and to help publishers meet their obligations under laws such as the European Accessibility Act and the ADA. We test client sites with standard accessibility tools, release improvements across the platform, generate VPATs as requested, and share guidance and events to help publishers make their own content accessible.

ScholarOne Manuscripts is the submission and peer review system used by more than 10,000 scholarly journals worldwide. We build it for the editorial offices, editors, reviewers, and authors who make peer review happen, at journals ranging from small society titles to high-volume commercial publishers.

ScholarOne manages every step from submission through screening, reviewer selection, decisions, revisions, and handoff to production. Automated reminders and communications keep work moving, and the system maintains a detailed record of submissions, reviews, and communications.

Yes, ScholarOne Gateway gives authors and reviewers a single view of their submissions and reviews across a publisher’s journals. When an editor transfers a manuscript to another journal in the portfolio, the author doesn’t need to start over, and the peer review history can move with it.

Your annual license covers hosting, the software, ongoing support, training resources and documentation, maintenance, and all platform upgrades, with no hidden fees. Standard integrations with our Silverchair Universe partners are implemented at no extra cost, and if you need custom development after launch, we scope and estimate that work with you first.

We build integrity checks into ScholarOne, including iThenticate similarity checking and native tools available only on ScholarOne Manuscripts, such as our Unusual Activity Detector, Prohibited Persons List, and authorship change and duplicate submission detection. Through the ScholarOne Relay API and the Silverchair Universe, publishers can also add screening from a wide variety of integrity partners directly in the editor’s workflow.

Yes. ScholarOne is designed to be highly configurable, and publishers can configure editorial roles, workflows, review forms, decision options, and emails for each journal. Most changes are made through configuration rather than custom work, so they’re quick to make, even after launch.

ScholarOne includes a full set of ready-to-run reports on submissions, decisions, the review process, reviewer performance, and editorial workload. Publishers with multiple journals can view data across their portfolio, and users can build their own reports, export them, and schedule them for automatic email delivery.

ScholarOne integrates with ORCID, Crossref, Ringgold, Web of Science, and many other identity and metadata integrations. Our Silverchair Universe partner program also offers ready-made integrations with dozens of best-in-class industry tools at no additional implementation cost. We’ve purposefully designed our platforms to be open and interoperable with authoring, peer review, and research integrity tools. We put the power of choice into our publishers’ hands to choose what services best fit their needs, enabling them to adapt to market changes, experiment, and find the best strategic partners. Standardized exports and documented APIs also let publishers easily connect ScholarOne with production, billing, and analytics systems. 

A dedicated implementation project manager guides every migration and works with you on a plan for when to stop taking new submissions in your current system and how to handle papers already in progress. We can also import your user records and historical manuscript data, so your editorial history stays available in ScholarOne. New clients typically start with a template site, and additional journals are then copied from the template. Because several can be in progress at once, many publishers hand over one to two new journal sites a week. View the full migration guide here. 

ScholarOne Conferences manages abstract submission, review, and program planning for scholarly meetings, from small events with 100 submissions to congresses with more than 20,000. ScholarOne Manuscripts handles journal submission and peer review, while ScholarOne Conferences covers meeting-specific work like abstract review, session scheduling, and speaker management.

Yes. Organizers can collect and review abstracts, build sessions on a drag-and-drop scheduling grid with automatic conflict checks, and manage speakers and their materials, all from one dashboard.

Abstract data from ScholarOne Conferences can be exported for journal supplements, abstract books, and proceedings, with composition services available through our partners. Through our Conference Repository partner, abstracts and posters from past meetings can also be archived online and searched across years.

Yes. ScholarOne Conferences supports in-person, virtual, and hybrid meetings, and program data can be shared with the MyItinerary mobile app and other event tools.

Organizers can review session statistics on a dashboard, check scheduling conflicts in a dedicated conflict report, and use score reports to compare reviewer recommendations and confirm decisions. All submission and program data can be exported for further analysis or tailored data feeds.