August was a big month for external reviews, faculty-facing transparency, and the infrastructure that keeps Scholarly fast and reliable. Here's what we shipped.

External Review Upgrades

External letter collection is one of the most coordination-heavy parts of promotion and tenure, so we gave it a lot of attention this month:

• Committees can see who nominated each external reviewer, when configured for the institution.

• Added an option for faculty to approve and send their own external letter nominations.

• The external reviewer term is now configurable per workflow step.

• Admins can add nomination instructions to the Letters tab, and optionally auto-approve nominations.

• Email deliveries to external reviewers are now visible right on the External Review page, so you always know what went out and when.

Workflow Upgrades

• Introduced step groups for organizing complicated workflows.

• Steps and connections can now be added or removed on live, in-progress workflows.

• Reviewers can send a response back directly from the review page — no admin intervention required.

• Choose whether step actions fire when a response is sent back for edits.

• Conditional logic can now branch on profile custom fields.

• Conditional logic can now operate on departments from non-primary appointments.

• Workflow cases now support additional documents, an area for storing documents associate with each case.

• Cleaned up the workflow diagram with consistent step colors and an option to hide it by default.

Faculty Activities & Dashboard

• Faculty now see a Profile Updates feed of activities added or changed since their last sign-in, and can review and acknowledge items that arrive from automated sources.

• Institutions can pin their own resource links to the faculty dashboard.

• Improved the UI for activities with many attachments.

• Academic-year custom fields can now appear on administrative profile timelines.

• CV Import: add a record manually mid-import, drag-to-copy across rows, highlight parsed content, and clearer accept/reject options.

Publications & Citations

• Began rolling out our OpenAlex integration: faculty publications and awards sync automatically, matched by ORCID or name and refreshed daily.

• Expanded configurable citation formats to cover nearly every permutation, and citations now render cleanly when fields like volume, issue, or publisher are missing.

Course Evaluations

• Tag questions with themes to break out results in reporting.

• Download course scores as a PDF, or explore them in the new scores grid.

• Course evaluations can now be managed through the API and the Scholarly Assistant.

Performance & Infrastructure

• Adding reviewers to workflow steps is dramatically faster at large institutions.

• Sped up activity tables, appointment APIs, and admin search throughout the app.

• Word document conversion now happens in-app, making letter and CV exports simpler and more reliable.

That's August. If you'd like to see any of these updates in action, book a demo.

Already a customer? Reach out to your Scholarly team with questions or feedback. Much of the above started as a customer request.