Product Updates, March 2025

Summary

Scholarly Software, Inc. continues to enhance its platform for higher education institutions with notable updates in March 2025, focusing on workflow management and faculty collaboration. The improved evaluation workflow engine now features a streamlined, faster interface, making it easier for administrators to manage statuses, reviewers, and deadlines. A major new capability is the addition of external reviewers to workflows, vital for promotion and tenure cases, with a secure, customizable, and login-free experience for external participants. Scholarly also introduced an expertise tagging module, leveraging faculty activity data to foster collaboration and facilitate expertise discovery across institutions. These updates are designed in partnership with customers, reflecting Scholarly’s commitment to practical, secure, and user-friendly solutions for academic administration.

What are the latest workflow improvements in Scholarly? * Scholarly has overhauled its workflow group page, splitting it into three focused sections (Status, Reviewers, Dates), making it faster and easier to manage evaluation, promotion, and tenure workflows.
How does the new external reviewer feature work? * Administrators can now add configurable external reviewers to any workflow, with a self-contained process that includes customizable invitations, login-free participation, and secure document handling—all within Scholarly.
What is expertise tagging and how does it benefit institutions? * Expertise tagging automatically generates and consolidates faculty expertise tags from activity data and documents, enabling easier collaboration, industry engagement, and expertise discovery across the institution.
Who can use the expertise tagging feature? * Both administrators and peer faculty members can access and leverage expertise tagging, making it a versatile tool for academic and collaborative purposes.
How does Scholarly ensure a secure and trustworthy experience for external reviewers? * All communications and document exchanges are managed securely within the Scholarly platform, with customizable branding and notification options, ensuring both privacy and institutional trust.

Scholarly’s product improvements are developed in close collaboration with customers and are designed to unlock the power of institutional data, automate workflows, and enhance faculty experiences. For more details or to see these features in action, book a demo with the Scholarly team.

Apr 2, 2025

Here are some of the product updates the Scholarly team shipped throughout the month of March. If you have questions about any of these, please get in touch with your account manager or drop an email to support@scholarlysoftware.com.

We've spent a good chunk of time continuing to improve our evaluation workflow engine in March. We also have a new expertise tagging module that we'll be speaking more about soon. Finally, we've added the ability to add external reviewers to any workflow. This is important for those tenure and promotion workflows.

🧹 Workflow Improvements

The workflows group page received an overhaul. Rather than being one page, it's been split into 3 pages. Those 3 pages are:
- Status
- Reviewers
- Dates
These separate pages make for better mapping of jobs-to-be-done when it comes to managing a workflow. Get the status at a glance, change reviewers for an individual, or change hard/soft due dates for that procrastinator.
This rework also allowed us to bring more actions to more places, making it easier to perform the action you want regardless of the page you're on.
We also simplified the modal dialogs to be more purpose-specific. Rather than changing everything about a case or a workflow, you'll just be editing the value you clicked on.
Oh, did we mention these pages are much faster as well?
These upgrades make continue to make it easier to manage not just evaluation workflows, but promotion and tenure workflows as well.

🚀 New: External Reviewers

Any workflow in the system can now have a configurable amount of external reviewers.
The entire external reviewer workflow is self-contained within the Scholarly platform. Here's a sneak peak:
- Promotion or Tenure Candidates can nominate a set number of external reviewers
- Administrators can add/remove/approve/deny different external reviewers. These actions may or may not be surfaced to the candidate, depending on the requirements of your institution.
- External Reviewers can be invited via a magic link or an email sent via our platform with institution branding and customized Reply-To and Sender addresses.
- External Reviewers get a login-less experience for indicated their interest in participation.
- External Reviewers can upload or type a letter on the Scholarly platform, while viewing the candidate materials side-by-side.
- Administrators are notified of each action an external reviewer takes, including opening the email or clicking an invitation link.
External Letters are attached to the case in question and viewable by all administrators of that case.
The copy that external reviewers see in email or on their landing pages can be customized with rich text, creating a trustworthy and personalized experience.
We'll be authoring a blog post and a video in the future doing a deeper dive into how this functionality works.
We've built this functionality in tandem with some of our customers, who launched their own workflows using external reviewers this month.

🚀 New: Expertise Tagging

Working hand-in-hand with one of our customers, Scholarly is now able to create expertise tags based on faculty activity.
Expertise tagging is a great way to foster collaboration among faculty or engage with local industry for collaboration. Some customers have also found this useful for interacting with local politicians
When enabled, this Scholarly crawls the activity captured for a faculty member to generate open-ended expertise tags. These tags are consolidated and matched against existing tags that might exist at the institution.
Scholarly deeply inspects files attached to activity, and can generate tags from syllabi, PowerPoint presentations, Word docs, CVs, and more.
Expertise Tagging is plugged in to Scholarly Assistant, allowing for easy and free-form querying.
Expertise Tagging is not just available to administrators, but peer faculty members as well.
Customers are loving this feature. It's a great way of creating more value from the Scholarly's all-in-one approach.
A few queries around expertise that Assistant has answered:
- "Who of my faculty members have expertise in bioinformatics?"
- "I'm looking for someone at my institution with expertise in carbon composite manufacturing. Who should I talk to?"
- "What industries are most common among the faculty's expertise?"