Product Updates, October 2025

Summary

October 2025 delivered a focused set of improvements to Scholarly, aimed at reducing friction in everyday tasks and eliminating bugs and inefficient processes. Highlights include My Documents for centralized file management, faculty-initiated workflows with powerful eligibility rules, conditional questions within workflows, a new Web of Science integration, a redesigned workflow navigation experience, support for effective-dated phone numbers, and robust sandbox environments for safer testing and onboarding.

What is “My Documents”? — A centralized place for storing and retrieving documents associated with a faculty member. Faculty can organize with folders, add any file type, and reuse files across the platform. Admins can contribute items such as appointment letters, and archived workflow documents appear automatically. Files can be locked to prevent changes.
What are faculty-initiated workflows? — Any workflow can be configured so faculty start it themselves (e.g., sabbatical, leave, conflict-of-interest). You can set eligibility rules (e.g., years in appointment, rank, department) and combine them with AND/OR logic for precise targeting.
Can questions be shown conditionally? — Yes. Questions within workflow steps can be made conditional based on faculty attributes (e.g., rank, time at institution) or prior answers (e.g., only show a follow-up if the previous response was “Yes”).
What integrations were added? — Scholarly now pulls publications from Clarivate’s Web of Science for joint customers, further reducing manual data entry in reviews and promotion processes. This complements existing integrations like Ellucian Banner, Ellucian Colleague, Workday, Symplectic Elements, Interfolio, and Watermark.
What changed on workflow pages? — Navigation from groups to faculty received an overhaul, with clearer visual diagrams (including concurrent steps) and purpose-built filtering and sorting to reach the right place with fewer clicks.
How are phone numbers handled now? — Faculty profiles support zero or more effective-dated phone numbers in both US and international formats, useful for visiting professors.
What are Sandboxes? — Cloneable, resettable environments that mirror production and carry full platform capability. Ideal for onboarding, experimenting with configuration, and safely testing API integrations.
Any other improvements? — Multiple department chairs, better typography and spacing on workflow pages, sortable activity tables within workflows, and numerous API and design refinements.
Where can users find more information or support? — Explore past updates on the Scholarly blog or contact your account team at support@scholarlysoftware.com.

“Streamline academic processes, reduce manual work, and give your faculty more time to do their best work.”

Ready to see these improvements in action? Book a demo with Scholarly to drive more impact at your institution.

Oct 31, 2025

October is only spooky at Scholarly if you're a bug or an inefficient process. This month saw a lot of improvements across the board, and new enhancements.

Here’s everything that shipped in October and is now available to all customers. (You can read past product updates on our blog.)

My Documents

Scholarly is introducing a new concept called "My Documents." This is a new place for storing and retrieving different documents associated with a faculty member.
This is rolling out to customers starting next week.
Faculty members can create folders to better organize files.
Faculty members can add documents of any file type. Institution and department admins may also add documents to faculty member's My Documents folders.
- Example: Institution admins can place appointment letters in a faculty member's folder for shared safe keeping.
Archived documents from workflows will appear in each faculty member's My Documents folder. This makes it easy to grab artifacts from different workflows over the years.
Documents can be locked, which prevents that file from being changed. Locking is great for contracts or other documents that should never be deleted or modified.
Throughout the Scholarly platform, users can now either upload a file from their computer OR choose from their My Documents folder. This makes document re-use a cinch.

Faculty-initiated Workflows

Scholarly now has the ability to create workflows that are faculty-initiated rather than pre-assigned. This is great for things like leave or sabbatical applications, conflict-of-interest reporting, and more.
Any workflow can be set to be faculty-initiated.
Making a workflow faculty-initiated allows for the setting of eligibility rules.
Eligibility rules decide who should be able to apply. These are incredibly powerful. Here are a few of our favorites:
- This workflow should be made available to anyone who has spent more than 3 years in their current appointment.
- This workflow should be made available to all assistant professors.
- This workflow should be made available to everyone in the Chemistry department.
These eligibility rules can be mixed-and-matched with AND/OR logic, allowing for very sophisticated rule sets.

Conditional Questions within Workflows

Similar to Faculty-initiated Workflows, we now have the ability to make questions conditional within workflow steps based on different attributes of the faculty member or the workflow itself.
Here are a few of our favorite examples:
- Only show this question to faculty members whose rank is above the candidate for promotion. This is useful for tenure/promotion balloting.
- Only show this question about mentorship to faculty members who have been at the institution for fewer than 2 years.
- Only show this question if the previous question was answered "Yes".

Web of Science Integration

Scholarly can now pull publications from Clarivate's Web of Science for institutions that are both Clarivate and Scholarly customers.
By pulling documents from Web of Science, Scholarly further eliminates the need for faculty members to enter information into workflows like annual reviews or promotion processes.
This is added to our growing list of databases and integrations, which now include Ellucian Banner, Ellucian Colleague, Workday, Symplectic Elements, Interfolio, Watermark, and more.

Workflow Page Improvements

Navigating through workflows, from groups down to faculty members, has received an overhaul.
This has been rolling out to Scholarly customers over the past few weeks. All customers will receive this within the next 2 weeks.
Every page now has a visual diagram of the workflow. This makes it easy to keep track of workflows with many steps, some of which are concurrent. We have some customers using this with 20+ step workflows!
Better filtering and sorting on each page. The filter and sort options are purpose-built just for workflows, requiring fewer clicks to get where you need to go.

Phone Numbers

Faculty profiles can now have zero or more phone numbers.
These phone numbers are effective-dated.
Phone numbers support both US and international formats, making it particularly useful for visiting professors from outside the US.

Sandboxes

To aid onboarding, institutions often wish to have a place to iterate on how their Scholarly instance is configured. Enter: Sandboxes.
Sandboxes are clones of a production instance. Some users within an institution (usually admins and the IT team) are granted access.
Sandboxes can be reset to wipe out all data. This is useful for testing API integrations and getting the Scholarly instance back to a clean slate.
At any time, Sandboxes can be cloned from production. This is really fast and takes about 2 minutes for our largest customers.
Sandboxes have the same technical resources allocated to them, meaning each Sandbox instance has the full capability of the Scholarly platform. Nothing is watered down.

Miscellaneous Improvements

Departments can now have multiple chairs on the platform.
Improved the readability and spacing of different fonts on all workflow pages.
Users can now sort faculty activities in tables when embedded in a workflow.
Dozens of bug fixes and enhancements to our API.
Made dozens of small design improvements throughout the app based on customer feedback.

That’s a wrap for October. Questions or feedback? Your account team is here to help at support@scholarlysoftware.com. See you next month!