So, let’s look back as we celebrate the opportunity to transform the future of scholarly publishing technology.
1993: Silverchair Takes Root
Silverchair begins its journey in Charlottesville, Virginia, focusing on indexing medical textbooks. Named after C.S. Lewis's fourth book in the Chronicles of Narnia series, we quickly establish specialized expertise in structured medical content organization—laying groundwork for future publishing innovations. For more on the early years of Silverchair, take a look at our company history here.2000: ScholarOne Emerges
ScholarOne is founded in Charlottesville just a few years later. Some of the earliest conversations about ScholarOne and Silverchair were taking place in the same rooms at the same time.ScholarOne is created to address a big challenge during the early digital age: streamlining manuscript submission and peer review processes. A notable local connection begins early as founders of ScholarOne, Silverchair, and Planet Systems Group all collaborate within Charlottesville's growing tech community. Planet Systems Group later becomes a key partner for both Silverchair’s and ScholarOne’s support services.
2007: Patent-Powered ScholarOne
ScholarOne reaches a significant milestone, receiving two patents for its innovative technology that facilitated web-based scholarly publishing workflows. These patents validate ScholarOne's approach to digital manuscript management—addressing the front-end of the publishing process.2010: Silverchair Platform Launch
Silverchair expands beyond its original indexing focus with the launch of the comprehensive Silverchair Platform. This solution creates enhanced value for publishers through integrated content hosting and discovery tools. Today, the platform hosts an impressive 11.6 million articles and 84,000 books—demonstrating Silverchair's growing capability in large-scale content management.2018: ScholarOne's Infrastructure Evolution
ScholarOne completes a major infrastructure upgrade, transitioning to Amazon Web Services. This strategic move enables the platform to scale significantly, now processing 3.6 million manuscripts annually. The upgrade represents ScholarOne's commitment to handling increasing submission volumes, complementing Silverchair's focus on content delivery at the other end of the publishing spectrum.2022: Silverchair Accelerates Growth
Silverchair secures a major growth investment from Thompson Street Capital Partners, fueling accelerated product development and global expansion. This milestone represents Silverchair’s maturing processes, development, and sustainable growth and secures its position as the leading independent technology platform for publishers.2024: ScholarOne and Silverchair Paths Converge
The parallel journeys finally intersect as Silverchair acquires ScholarOne. This strategic integration brings together two complementary systems that developed in the same town but addressed different segments of scholarly publishing. The acquisition extends Silverchair's reach across the entire publishing lifecycle—creating a unified solution from manuscript submission through peer review to final publication and discovery. The Silverchair team now includes 240 people across eight countries, about half of whom joined following the ScholarOne acquisition.
For many colleagues at Silverchair and ScholarOne who still work in Charlottesville, this move brought friends, colleagues, and neighbors back together.
What makes this three-decade timeline remarkable is the clear pattern of complementary innovation. While operating independently, Silverchair and ScholarOne develop solutions for different aspects of scholarly publishing workflows. When joined together, they create the opportunity for powerful points of connection that can lead to a more integrated publishing ecosystem.
Our partnership represents the natural evolution of independent scholarly communications technology, creating future opportunities for an integrated approach to the complete content lifecycle. From separate beginnings in a small Virginia town to a comprehensive global publishing solution, the Silverchair and ScholarOne timeline demonstrates how parallel innovation paths can create more value when they come together.