Now, as part of a greatly expanded and global organization, I make these visits because I believe, with some conviction, that maintaining what made small Silverchair worth growing requires showing up in person. Not to inspect operations, but to experience the place. To ask about the history. To sit across a table from people whose daily reality is genuinely different from mine and let that difference do something to me.
As written by Mary Anne Radmacher, “I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” I come home full. The food had something to do with that. So did everything else.
Humble and Local Beginnings
Silverchair was founded in Charlottesville in 1993. For much of its early history, nearly everyone worked together in that single building. The culture that grew there became something the scholarly publishing industry talks about. Small, irreverent, excellent, high-touch.We differentiated ourselves in the industry with that culture by tightly connecting our people and our clients. Silverchair convened with clients, not just served them. Conferences and forums and dinners. Roadmap conversations from front-line to executive. Clients knew the people they worked with by name and by personality. That wasn’t a feature of the product: . It was a core foundation of the product. Clients didn’t just use Silverchair. They loved being a part of it. Prospects were envious of what Silverchair clients got to experience.
At around 40 clients across the US and UK, this worked almost naturally. The question that would eventually need answering was whether it could survive scale. Whether what Charlottesville produced was a proof of concept that could travel, or something more fragile than that.
The pandemic forced an answer faster than we expected.
An Unexpected Catalyst
When COVID hit, Designing for Hybrid Work: The Silverchair Story. The fear at the time was real: if being in the same building together was the secret ingredient, going remote should have broken something.But it didn’t. The culture turned out to be less about the building than about the people in it and the practices they kept. If anything, going remote forced Silverchair to codify things that had previously been ambient. To make explicit what had been assumed. To hire and develop our people even more carefully. Remote work became the foundation for something we couldn’t have planned: the capacity to hire anywhere, serve anywhere, and eventually operate anywhere. That capacity would matter more than we knew.
To be honest, this wasn’t a strategy. It was an adaptation. The strategy came later.
The strategy arrived at scale in late 2024, when Silverchair acquired ScholarOne from Clarivate.
Accelerating Expansion with ScholarOne
Overnight, we went from a company that was going global to one that already was. 650+-plus clients across the world. Teams in new geographies. A product with 25 years of history, its own culture, and its own loyal community. The question in front of us wasn’t whether to scale but if we could do it while maintaining the same standards.We decided yes. The mechanism was deliberate cultural integration, not just operational migration. In the first six months, we migrated all major systems: invoicing, Salesforce, financial infrastructure, support tooling. More importantly, we updated our Culture Code. We defined our values in action. Every incoming ScholarOne team member received these documents. Many received them in person, directly from a Silverchair executive. What followed was something we genuinely didn’t anticipate: The Best Kind of Culture Shock. One Year In: ScholarOne and Silverchair's Shared Journey Forward
Making it Work
The conventional wisdom about scaling a high-touch service company is that intimacy is a function of size. You can be close to 40 clients, not 650. Silverchair has treated that as a design problem rather than a law of nature. Every operational decision we’ve made since going global has been made in that spirit.We split the Customer Success function into US, European, and APAC regions, organizing around geographic proximity to clients so that in-person relationships could continue at global scale. We built distributed and multilingual Customer Care teams delivering native-language enterprise support during native business hours, so that the author in Seoul gets the same quality of service as the author in New York. Our support chatbot serves authors in their own languages, 24 hours a day. We localized our marketing for WeChat and integrated with Charlesworth for Chinese ScholarOne customers, because meeting clients in their world rather than asking them to navigate yours is the standard, not a courtesy. We expanded our presence at conferences and community events in Europe and China, hosting our own events there and extending the community model to markets where Silverchair was once unknown.
And we’ve invested in leadership travel. I’ve been to Honduras, Serbia, China, and Japan because of this work. Not to audit. T: to experience. To build relationships. To ensure our decision making appropriately considers the diverse perspectives that make up the organization. Most companies optimize this kind of travel out of existence. We’ve made it a practice, because a signal that says “your context matters to us enough that we showed up for it” travels far through an organization.
None of this was free. Going global is a learning process, and learning processes have a price.
When Silverchair first explored globalization by entering Latin America, we hired developers, QA engineers, and business analysts across multiple countries before finding the right people in the right places for our needs. Turnover was high early on. It took some trial and error before we understood how to source well, what to look for, how to onboard people to platforms as complex as ours. Expanding to LatAm gave our teams time zone alignment with our East Coast colleagues, which made sustained daily collaboration possible in a way it couldn't have been with more distant geographies. The learning cost was part of getting there.
Over time we built the organizational knowledge that couldn’t be shortcut. A stable core of strong performers grew, and referral networks followed from that foundation.
Embracing Our New footprint
Here’s what I notice when I look at all of it together.Cultural diversity is happening on Silverchair teams right now, organically. People from Serbia, China, Japan, India, Honduras, the US, and across Latin America working side by side every day. That proximity is producing something. You can feel it in how problems get framed, how disagreements get navigated, how teams respond under pressure. Nobody designed it exactly. It arrived as a byproduct of deliberate geographic expansion.
The question I keep returning to is what comes after accommodation.
Most organizations that go global learn to accommodate cultural difference. They adjust holiday calendars, build time zone coverage, add language support. Silverchair has done those things and they matter. But accommodation is a threshold, not a destination.
Amplification is something harder and more interesting. The way a colleague in Serbia approaches a systems problem, the relationship-first instinct that shapes how partners in Japan think about new engagements, the creative friction that comes from a standup where people are reasoning from genuinely different assumptions, where language itself sometimes makes you work harder to find clarity, and where that extra effort tends to surface something a room full of similar thinkers would have missed. These are not differences to work around. They are capabilities. Perspectives that a culturally homogeneous team, however talented, cannot produce on its own.
What the research establishes most reliably is something that often gets missed. The more important question is not what diversity adds. The more important question is what homogeneity costs. Homogeneous teams have been shown to exhibit higher overconfidence and shallower information processing. For a company building technology for a global scholarly community, researchers and publishers and editors spanning dozens of countries, languages, and disciplinary traditions, having a workforce that reflects that world is sound organizational design.
Some of what I believe goes beyond what any study has proven. People who work alongside someone from another country every day become slightly larger in their thinking. Less hemmed in by what they assumed was universal. Better colleagues, better problem-solvers, better at the empathy that good client relationships require. Seeing your culture recognized and celebrated inside a foreign company makes you more invested in it. Leaders who actually travel to the places where their people live come back changed in ways that matter to the decisions they make.
None of this is to say that our work is done. We still have meaningful gaps and areas keen for improvement. Building on our foundation intentionally, at company scale, is the work in front of us, and I think it’s where the most interesting value lives.
What to Expect from a Global Silverchair
If you’ve been a Silverchair client since the Hardware Store days, or since ScholarOne’s early years, here’s what I want you to know. What you loved about working with us was never a function of Charlottesville, or of a particular size, or of a particular era. It was a function of who we hire, what we hold each other to, and what we believe the relationship between our people and yours should feel like. That hasn’t changed. It is just operating at a different scale, in more time zones, in more languages. The standard is the same.If you’re a publisher in Tokyo or Beijing or London evaluating whether Silverchair understands your world, I’ll be direct. We’re still learning it. We’ve made investments that prove the intention is real. We’ve built the structure. We’re asking questions that most of our competitors aren’t asking yet, because we think the answers will matter.
Going global, done right, doesn’t dilute what made Silverchair a company worth growing. It makes the company better, if you’re willing to let it. And we are.ir.