In today’s Kitchen Essentials, we hear from Brian Cody, CEO of Scholastica, founded in 2012, to provide modular software services for academic journal publishers of all types. Now used by more than 1,200 journals, Scholastica’s goal is “to empower academic organizations to publish top-quality journals more efficiently and affordably so they can further their scholarly missions.”

Please tell us a bit about yourself — your role at Scholastica, how you got there, and why you embarked on a career in research infrastructure?

First: thanks for having me on the “Kitchen Essentials” series – I’ve really been enjoying reading the interviews!

I’m the CEO of Scholastica and one of the three co-founders. I started Scholastica while working on a PhD in Sociology at the University of Chicago. I was planning to be a professor but always had side projects I was working on, which included learning to code and exploring building web applications with friends, which led to the prototype of Scholastica. In the years after the Great Recession, the sociology job market prospects struck me as particularly bleak, so I decided to leave academia to pursue building Scholastica in 2013. While I loved teaching and research, I felt I would ultimately be more fulfilled around academia rather than in academia – and I’m very satisfied with that decision, as difficult as it was at the time.

What do you like most and least about working in research infrastructure?

I enjoy building things – via writing code, through woodworking, by launching new business initiatives – and I get a thrill out of unraveling the mystery of how something is built and what it’s built to do, and then creatively exploring potential alternatives. Research infrastructure is interesting from a technical standpoint, which I enjoy, and complex enough to be intellectually challenging. I find myself constantly able to learn and explore and try building new things within this space. I also really appreciate how research infrastructure is ultimately in service of the pursuit of knowledge, and it’s academia-adjacent, which is a familiar milieu for me.

As there have been new challenges in the industry (e.g. transitioning to open access, paper mills, AI-driven threats to research integrity, etc.), I feel that there can be an initial mood of fear and stress permeating discussions about these topics at conferences, one aspect being each participant dreading facing these new challenges alone as a separate journal/society/publisher. I’m hoping that more robust research infrastructure and a wider range of tools can help the community have more optimism and less stress as new challenges arise.

Based on your own experiences, what advice would you give someone starting, or thinking of starting, a career in research infrastructure?

Don’t think of this as one uniform industry. Rather, think of it as many smaller industries interrelated. It took me a while to mentally model the full variety of publishing organizations in terms of program scale, scope, organizational goals, the number and complexity of workflows, the scale of technical debt, and relationships with learned societies. There are commonalities, sure, but from a research infrastructure side there is a large variety of needs and challenges across organizations.

I think this advice is especially pertinent for anyone coming out of academic training – oncology publishers don’t work in the same way as engineering or psychology or history or chemistry publishers. The assumptions you can have about publishing based on your own disciplinary background can function as blinders in understanding the larger academic publishing and research infrastructure space.

What sort of infrastructure does Scholastica provide, and who are your users?

Scholastica is a scholarly journal publishing technology provider offering modern software and services for peer review management, article production, and Open Access journal hosting. All our solutions are modular, meaning they can be used individually or integrated with each other. For a quick(ish) breakdown, we have:

• The Scholastica Peer Review System: Software for journal editors to manage the peer review process from submission through decision in a user-friendly interface that’s built to maximize efficiency.
• The Scholastica Production Service: We use a software-based process augmented by machine learning to typeset PDF and metadata-rich full-text XML article files for journals more quickly and reliably than traditional options (with no file formatting, validation, or conversion steps for editors/authors).
• The Scholastica OA Journal Publishing Platform: An end-to-end journal hosting solution with tools to set up a modern and discoverable journal website, integrate with archives and indexes services (like Portico, Crossref, and PMC), and track readership analytics.

Scholastica has been around for over ten years now, and we’ve been working with an increasingly broad range of journals and publishers over that time. Our clients range from scholarly societies publishing single flagship titles to larger publishers like Johns Hopkins University Press, Penn Press, the Academy of International Business, and the American Academy of Optometry. Currently, Scholastica is used by over 1,200 journals.

In terms of how our solutions relate to supporting broader research infrastructure, I think about how we’re working to support the latest industry best practices, such as producing correct and complete metadata for journals in line with established standards like DOIs and ORCID iDs and new initiatives like CRediT. I think about our role creating clean and consistent XML, which enhances discoverability and is key to long-term preservation. I also think about how we’re working to make it easy for publishers to connect with and send information to and from the various scholarly communication ecosystem touch points including archives, indexes, research integrity tools like the Similarity Check plagiarism detection service, fee management tools like CCC RightsLink, and external publishing tools and systems.

How is Scholastica sustained financially?

Scholastica is used by over 1,200 journals, and our customers pay for the software and digital services they use. Some of this is through annual subscriptions, some is metered (e.g., per article XML/PDF produced, per submitted manuscript to peer review). We’re proud that our pricing is transparent and listed on our website (https://scholasticahq.com/pricing), which is something we wish was more the norm in this industry.

As the leader of a research infrastructure organization, what do you think are the biggest opportunities we’ve not yet realized as a community — and what’s stopping us?

I think accelerating the building and adoption of shared infrastructure is a massive opportunity – and a huge challenge. Things like expanding ROR’s fidelity and increasing its adoption, requiring ORCID authentication for all authors industry-wide, and universal FAIR data implementation would be a massive boon to the access and use of research. However, the pace feels slow since each of the thousands of individual publishers and research organizations have to learn about, prioritize, allocate resources towards, and implement these types of initiatives to realize the benefits at scale.

Collective action is difficult, and I appreciate the work from industry member organizations like Crossref and collaborative projects like the OA Switchboard through OASPA and others, which move these kinds of shared research infrastructure improvements forward. I’d love to see more projects on shared resources for battling current challenges – for example, a shared community repository of article figures which could be used as a data source for detecting duplicate images.

Looking at your own organization, what are you most proud of, and what keeps you awake at night?

I’m proud of how wide a range of journal publishers we serve – university presses, scholarly societies, nonprofit organizations, and campus-based publishers. Offering software and services that are effective and affordable across this range of publishers has been challenging, from the University of California Press to RTI International to AAPOR, but also VERY rewarding to see how our offerings can help these organizations further their goals.

What keeps me awake at night is probably familiar to any company founder or organizational leader, especially given the unpredictability of the initial COVID pandemic years. People’s livelihoods rely on the Scholastica leadership team setting goals and deciding on strategies that allow the company to continue to grow within an industry that is constantly changing. I feel the weight of setting effective company direction, and while it is a challenge I also appreciate that it is a privileged exercise in agency.

What impact has/does/will AI have on Scholastica?

I think the last two years of new LLM and AI-powered tools have been extremely exciting from a technology standpoint. The latest AI advances have caused a paradigm shift in how we work at Scholastica. We’re still solving technical problems, but now we have to remember to ask ourselves “is there a solution that AI could, or should, be part of?” The potential for one or more parts of a complicated solution to work quickly and reliably through AI is high and has to be explored. Everyone at the company has to work at developing our sense for when and how AI can be helpful, while also balancing questions of ethical data and when the non-deterministic output of AIs is acceptable or not in terms of quality assurance.

What changes do you think we’ll see in terms of the overall research infrastructure over the next five to ten years, and how will they impact the kinds of roles you’ll be hiring for at Scholastica?

I think we’ll see even more demand for interoperability over the next five to ten years, as the number of tools and platforms proliferate, and publishers want to mix and match more and more solutions in novel ways.

I expect we’ll see (remarkably) increasingly capable AI tools, which I could anticipate pushing us to increase emphasis when hiring on general critical thinking and broad operations skills and slightly less on subject-matter specific skills. This would mean looking for people who are creative problem solvers, and skilled in learning and leveraging constantly-emerging AI tools to solve novel problems and excel at rapid implementation.