The Scholardemia field guide

A Workspace is the home for a group: a journal team, a research lab, a learned society, a university department. It is not a shared folder. It is everything the group needs to run itself: its team, its website, its email, its publishing, and its news, all under one roof.

Your team, organised

Invite colleagues by email and give each person a role that matches their responsibility, from owner and admin down to member. People can also request to join, and you approve or decline. The workspace keeps a shared media library for logos, photos, and files, and a dashboard showing what needs attention. When someone leaves, removing them removes their access everywhere at once, including the workspace's connected social media accounts, which are automatically protected the moment a member is offboarded.

Run a journal with a real website

A workspace can run one or more academic journals from start to finish. Each journal gets a complete public website: a homepage, the current issue, a browsable archive, the editorial board, policy pages, and a submission page for authors. You can buy a web address (like yourjournal.org) without leaving the product; the technical setup, the security certificate, the lot of it is handled for you. The pages themselves are edited with a drag-and-drop page builder, so the site looks professional on day one and can be restyled any time without touching code.

Diamond open access, with the plumbing included

Every journal on Scholardemia is a diamond open access journal. Scholardemia journals do not charge article processing charges (APCs). Articles are open for everyone to read, unless a journal sets a time-limited embargo. That is the model the platform is built around, not an optional setting. And the scholarly plumbing that normally makes this hard comes included: each published article automatically receives a DOI (the permanent identifier that makes a paper citable forever), and the journal's details flow to DOAJ, the directory libraries trust for open-access journals. What usually takes a small journal months of paperwork and technical setup is simply how publishing works here. The Publications section below goes deeper.

Templates that guide your authors

A journal can define manuscript templates for authors to follow, covering the required sections, the structure, and the formatting, so submissions arrive in the journal's shape instead of a different shape per author. The submission process itself is configurable too: your journal's own intake form asks for exactly the information your editors need. Less time reformatting and chasing missing details; more time editing.

One form engine, everywhere

Scholardemia includes a full form builder, and it is not a side feature: the same engine appears wherever structured answers are needed, in research and in editorial work alike.

For research: build questionnaires and surveys as proper instruments: multiple choice with an "other, please specify" option, scales, and free text, organised into sections and multiple pages, with conditional logic that shows or hides questions depending on earlier answers. Share a survey with a simple link that anyone can answer, no account needed, or post it straight to the social feed to reach your field. Responses collect automatically, results appear in built-in charts, and a survey's responses can become a dataset in the Data Hub, ready to explore, chart, and cite. Questionnaire to analysable data, without a spreadsheet in between.

For editorial work: the same builder creates the review forms your assessors fill in. A journal designs the exact questions and scoring rubric its peer reviewers answer, and that form appears beside the sealed manuscript. An event designs its own review form for judging abstracts and papers. Event feedback surveys after a conference come from the same engine too. Design once, and the form travels with the workflow: reviewer answers land in the editorial record, survey answers land in your results.

Post once, reach every feed

A lab or team announcement rarely belongs in just one place. From the workspace, one post can go to the Scholardemia social feed and to the group's connected outside accounts (Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky among them) at the same time, immediately or on a schedule. Every send is tracked per channel, and failed deliveries retry automatically. One composer, every audience, with a record of what went where.

Do the daily work in one place

The workspace carries the group's working tools. An Editorial Desk shows every manuscript moving through review. A shared team mailbox lets the whole team answer editor@yourjournal.org together, with shared drafts, saved reply templates, and signatures, so nothing depends on one person forwarding emails. A newsletter tool manages subscribers and sends campaigns. A newsroom publishes announcements to the public site. A shared reference library holds the group's sources, and members can copy in collections from their personal libraries.

Speak as the organisation

Here is something you will not find elsewhere: the workspace itself can send messages. When a journal needs to write to an author, the message can come from the journal, not from one staff member's personal account. Correspondence stays institutional, and it survives staff changes.

Your own AI, under your control

If a workspace wants machine assistance, for example help screening submissions, it plugs in its own AI account keys. The costs and the control stay with the organisation, never pooled with anyone else.

Taken together, one workspace replaces a website builder, a mailing-list service, a shared email tool, a social media scheduler, and a journal management system, and all of it already knows who your team is.

Connects to:Your own domain name, email on that domain, Stripe for billing, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and other social accounts, your own AI provider accounts

Running an academic conference normally means stitching together a ticketing site, a review system, a spreadsheet for the programme, a badge printer, and a certificate template. Scholardemia's Events area is all of those in one product.

Set up and sell tickets

Create the event, describe it, and open registration. Tickets can be free or paid; card payments are handled by Stripe, the same payment company trusted across the internet. You can offer discount codes, take group registrations, run a waitlist when the room is full, require approval before a registration counts, and handle transfers ("my colleague is coming instead of me") and refunds without email ping-pong. Personal invitations can be sent, tracked, and politely re-sent to people who have not answered. Guests can register without creating an account, verified simply by email, which matters when your audience includes one-time visitors. Attendees automatically receive their ticket by email and a calendar entry; the registration form can also collect travel preferences when logistics need them. Organisers get invoices and a settlement statement showing the money side clearly. And when the conference is annual, save the whole setup as an event template and stamp out next year's edition from it.

Build the programme

A visual programme designer lays out a multi-day, multi-room schedule. Parallel sessions sit side by side, so clashes are visible at a glance. Each session can carry its speakers, slides and materials, a live poll, and a question board where the audience submits questions and votes the best ones up. Attendees tick the sessions they want and get a personal "my schedule". The whole programme exports as a designed PDF for printing.

Call for papers, with real peer review

Academic events need something ticketing websites never offer: submissions. You publish a call for abstracts or papers with your own submission form, and design the review form your assessors will answer: the questions and scoring that fit your event, built in the platform's form builder. Reviewers assess each submission with identities hidden on both sides, exactly as scholarly standards require. Accept and reject decisions happen in the same place. The author who submitted and the attendee who registers are the same person in the system, so nothing is retyped.

Certificates, badges, and digital passes, designed by you

Events come with three built-in visual designers, so an event's credentials look like your event, not a generic printout. The badge designer lays out the name badges attendees wear, ready for printing at the door. The certificate designer, a guided step-by-step tool, produces certificates of attendance and participation; each issued certificate carries a certificate number and a public verification page, so anyone can confirm "this person really attended" years later. And the pass designer creates digital tickets for the wallet app on attendees' phones, the same kind of pass an airline sends, with your event's branding, delivered automatically with the registration. Design each one once; the system fills in every attendee's details.

On the day

Before the doors open, QR-code tickets can be emailed to every attendee in one action. Then a check-in kiosk runs on a tablet at the door: attendees present the pass on their phone, and they are through. Badges come off the printer in the design you made. Announcements go out to everyone mid-event when the room changes, event messaging keeps organisers and attendees in touch, and a networking feature helps attendees find each other, which is, after all, why half of them came.

Afterwards, automatically

When the event ends, the system can send thank-you messages, issue the certificates, and deliver a feedback survey without anyone lifting a finger. Sponsors get their showcase; annual conferences link into a series; online sessions connect to Zoom or Google Meet. The event can even be embedded as a widget on any other website, so a society's own homepage carries live event details without anyone copying them across.

Connects to:Stripe payments, Apple and Google phone wallets, Zoom, Google Meet, Google Calendar, calendar files for any app

A social network where the posts have evidence. The feed looks familiar (follow people, read, reply) but it is built around how researchers actually talk: claims come with references, and topics matter as much as follower counts.

A feed worth reading

Your home feed gathers posts from people you follow, topics you track, and groups you belong to. The difference is what a post can carry: actual scholarly references, attached to the post itself. When someone makes a claim, the paper behind it is one click away. Conversation stays anchored to the literature instead of drifting into assertion.

Topics, not just followers

Every post can be tagged with subjects such as "heritage tourism", "food safety", "research methods", drawn from a shared, platform-wide topic system. Follow a topic and good work in that field reaches you even when its author is a first-year PhD student nobody follows yet. Each topic has its own page and its own following, which means ideas can travel on merit, not just on network size. That is a quietly radical thing for early-career researchers.

The essentials, done properly

Mention a colleague with @ and they are notified. Reply, bookmark anything to read later, and manage notifications that reach you in the app, on your phone, or by email, as you choose. Trending topics are calculated from the platform's own live stream of research news, not from outrage mechanics.

Post once, publish everywhere

For organisations, the feed doubles as a broadcasting desk. A workspace connects its external social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky among them) and then writes once. The post goes to followers on Scholardemia and to each connected outside network, on a schedule if you like. Every send is tracked per channel, and if an outside network has a hiccup, the delivery retries automatically. A journal announcing its new issue reaches its academic audience and its public audience from a single composer, with a record of exactly what went where.

The profile behind every post

Click any author and you land on a real scholarly profile: their posts sit beside their publications, their citation metrics, their projects, and the conferences they are speaking at. On most networks, a profile is a bio and a photo. Here, it is a career, and that changes the quality of the conversation, because everyone can see who they are talking to and what their work says.

Connects to:Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and other connected accounts, the live research-news stream, the platform-wide topic system, phone notifications

Two newsrooms in one. The first brings you the world's research news, refreshed all day without anyone curating it. The second gives every organisation its own news page: a proper publication for announcements, not posts that scroll away.

Research news on tap

Behind the scenes, more than a hundred standing searches sweep the world's news sources every fifteen minutes, looking for stories about research, universities, funding, and discovery. Duplicates are removed, and every story keeps a link back to its original source, so you can always see where a claim came from. The result reads like a wire service for academia: open the news feed at any hour and it is current. Nobody on your team has to maintain it; it simply runs.

From the story to the record

Research news is only half the picture; the other half is the research itself. Scholardemia carries reference pages for millions of papers, authors, universities, and journals, built on OpenAlex, a vast open catalogue of the world's scholarship. So when a story mentions a lab, you can step straight from the headline to what that lab has actually published. News and the scholarly record sit one click apart, which is exactly where they belong.

Your own newsroom

Every workspace can publish news of its own. Write the article in the same rich editor used everywhere on the platform, preview exactly how it will look, then publish immediately or schedule it for later. The article appears on your public website, including on your own domain, as a permanent, professional page with a web address you can share for years. When someone shares it on WhatsApp, LinkedIn, or Facebook, it shows a proper preview card with your image and summary, because those details are handled for you. Editorial controls decide who on the team is allowed to publish.

Reach inboxes too

News pages are for visitors; newsletters are for your faithful. The same workspace manages a subscriber list, with sign-ups, confirmation emails, and unsubscribes all handled, and sends your announcement as an email campaign. A call for papers written once becomes a web page, a social post, and a newsletter, each in its natural form.

Connects to:OpenAlex's open catalogue of research, automated news gathering, the newsletter system, link-preview cards for social sharing, your own domain

Grants, special issues, theses, lab operations: research is projects, and most of them are managed today in a spreadsheet nobody trusts. Scholardemia includes full project management, and it lives next to the documents, people, and deadlines the work is actually about.

Boards you can see

Each project is a board of columns, for example "To do", "In progress", "Done", or any stages you choose, with task cards you drag between them. When a teammate moves a card, you see it move, live. Saved views remember your favourite filters; labels and custom fields let you organise tasks by whatever matters to your team, whether that is work package, funder, or chapter.

Tasks with real depth

Open a task and there is room for everything: a checklist of steps, a due date with reminders, file attachments, a comment thread, and a record of time spent. Tasks can depend on each other ("data cleaning cannot start until collection finishes"), so the true order of work is visible instead of remembered. Watch a task to be notified when it changes; edit many tasks at once when plans shift.

More than one way to look

The same project also appears as a timeline, a calendar, and a workload view that shows at a glance who is overloaded and who has room. Progress reports and analytics summarise how the project is moving. Templates capture a structure you repeat, such as a grant cycle or an issue production schedule, so the next one starts half-built. Work moves in and out by import and export when you need it to.

Let the board run itself

An automation engine takes over the ritual work: when something happens, do something: move a card, set a value, fire a follow-up. Every rule has a test mode, so you can check what it would do before letting it loose on real tasks.

Connected to the real work

This is the part no standalone tool can copy. A task called "revise section 4" links to the actual manuscript in Documents. Project deadlines share a calendar with your conference dates and your review due-dates. And the colleague you assign is the same person you message, cite, and co-author with: one identity, everywhere.

Connects to:Documents, the shared platform calendar, live updates between teammates, the automation engine, import and export

This is where the writing happens: a shared online editor built for scholarly work. Several people can write in the same document at the same time, every change is accounted for and, uniquely, formal peer review is built into the document itself.

Write together, live

Co-authors edit simultaneously and see each other's cursors moving. Nothing is overwritten, nothing needs emailing back and forth, and there is no "final_v7_REALLY_FINAL.docx"; there is one document, always current, with its entire history kept.

Every change accounted for

Version history lets you look back at any earlier state. Track changes records each insertion and deletion so a supervisor or co-author can accept or reject them one by one, or all at once. Comments pin to the exact sentence they discuss, hold a threaded conversation, and are marked resolved when dealt with. An activity timeline answers "who changed what, and when", the question every collaboration eventually asks.

References without the pain

A built-in reference manager holds your sources, synchronises with Zotero (the reference tool many researchers already use), and inserts citations as you write, formatted in the citation style you choose. Bibliographies stop being a formatting chore.

From draft to submission

Set up the page, preview the print layout, and export a professional PDF. Import existing documents to continue them here, including designs brought in from Canva. Before submitting anywhere, run a plagiarism check for peace of mind.

Share on your terms

Sharing is precise: each person is an owner, editor, commenter, or viewer, and an "anyone with the link" pass can be handed out and revoked at any time. A document is exactly as open or as private as you decide.

Review mode: the honest copy

When a paper enters formal peer review, the rules tighten automatically. The reviewer is shown a sealed, anonymised copy: a frozen snapshot with the authors' names removed, digitally fingerprinted so that what the reviewer reads is provably, byte-for-byte, what was submitted. Neither side sees the other's name. The review form opens right beside the manuscript, so assessing a paper and reading it happen in one view. In every other tool, "being reviewed" means exporting, emailing, and logging into some portal. Here it is simply a mode of the document.

Connects to:Zotero, citation styles, plagiarism checking, PDF export and import, the peer-review system

Most academics check five places every morning: email, a chat app, a review portal, a calendar, and whatever the conference is using. Scholardemia's Inbox is one front door for all of it, and the email in it is real email.

Real email, really yours

You hold genuine email addresses here, including addresses on your own domain, like you@yourjournal.org, and can write to and receive from anyone on the internet, not just platform members. Related messages gather into tidy threads even when replies arrive from different addresses. Search finds anything. For sensitive material, a secure link can carry the content instead of the message body.

Messages and chat in the same list

Direct messages and group conversations live alongside your mail rather than in a separate app. Where discretion matters, messages can be set to disappear after a time you choose.

Shared mailboxes for teams

An editorial team's address, say editor@yourjournal.org, becomes a shared mailbox the whole team works together. Everyone sees what has been read and answered. Drafts are shared, so a colleague can finish a reply you started. Saved templates answer the questions that arrive weekly, and signatures are set per sender. The forwarding chains and "did anyone reply to this?" confusion simply end.

Review invitations arrive here too

When you are invited to review a paper, the request appears in a dedicated Reviews section of your inbox, alongside your mail. It shows the submission, the deadline, and your role. You accept, decline, or declare a conflict of interest right there. One more click opens the sealed, anonymised manuscript with the review form beside it. And if the invitation reached you in your ordinary email and you click it from there, you land on exactly the right item, even if you had to sign in on the way.

Your calendar, in the flow

Calendar entries appear in the same unified stream, so the day's commitments sit next to the day's correspondence.

The idea is simple: everything the platform asks of you arrives where you already look. One inbox, checked once, instead of five tabs checked anxiously.

Connects to:Email on your own domain, any email address in the world, the peer-review system, the calendar, secure message links

An academic jobs board with an unfair advantage: it lives inside the network where the candidates, their publications, and their reputations already are.

For job seekers

Browse and search postings with full detail pages, and keep a dedicated careers profile. Save the jobs you like. Better, save the search: "lecturer, tourism, Europe" becomes a standing alert, and the system re-runs it every half hour. When a matching post appears, you hear about it while it is fresh, not three weeks later on a mailing list digest. Every application you make is tracked in one list, so the state of your job hunt stops living in a spreadsheet and your memory.

For employers and departments

Posting a job is a guided form, not a phone call to a sales team. An employer dashboard keeps your postings in one place, and applicant tracking moves candidates through your stages (received, shortlisted, interviewed), so the committee always sees the same, current picture.

Kept clean on purpose

Academic job boards are notorious for stale posts and misleading listings. Here, postings pass through an intake and moderation step before going live. Quality control is a feature, not an afterthought.

Jobs on your own website

A society or journal can surface its vacancies on its own public site, the same custom-domain website its workspace already runs. The department's jobs appear on the department's own masthead, automatically, with no second website to maintain. Shared anywhere, a posting shows a proper preview card rather than a bare link.

The profile is the CV

This is the deeper advantage. On a generic job site, a candidate is a PDF. Here, a candidate's profile already carries their actual publications, their citation record, their projects, their conference talks, all accumulated naturally through using the platform, not typed into yet another form. The evidence a hiring committee actually wants is native material. For candidates, that means your work speaks before your cover letter does; for committees, it means less guesswork and fewer reconstructions.

Connects to:Workspace websites on custom domains, email alerts, link-preview cards, researcher profiles and publication records

This is the deepest part of the platform: a complete scholarly publishing house in software. A journal can go from "author submits" to "published, citable, and indexed worldwide" without leaving Scholardemia, and readers get a proper home for discovering it all.

From submission to decision

Authors submit through your journal's own form. Editors screen each manuscript, with optional AI assistance running on the workspace's own AI account, so the journal controls the cost and the policy. Reviewers are invited from the inbox, and the review itself runs under the protections described in the Documents section: sealed anonymous copies, hidden identities, and a review form the journal designed itself in the platform's form builder, with its own questions and its own scoring rubric. Submitted reviews are sealed so they cannot be quietly altered afterwards. The editor decides which reviewer comments are released to the author and when. Decisions, revision rounds, and the full correspondence are all recorded in one editorial trail.

From acceptance to the world

Accepted papers move through production into issues, managed on a publishing queue. When an issue is ready, the system can compile the entire issue into a single designed PDF, cover to cover, of the kind that normally requires a typesetter. Special issues have their own pages and their own calls for papers, so a themed collection is announced, gathered, and published as a first-class thing rather than a tag on ordinary issues.

The author's side

Authors are not left refreshing their email. Every submission has a status page where its author follows the paper's progress, including on the journal's own domain, and a personal "my submissions" page gathers everything they have submitted across the platform in one list. Correspondence with the editorial team is threaded and kept with the submission, so the conversation and the manuscript stay together.

The editor's quality of life

A set of quiet features removes the drudgery editors know too well. Each journal keeps a reviewer pool: its own roster of trusted reviewers to draw on. Late reviewers are chased automatically, with polite reminders that escalate on a schedule, so no editor spends Friday writing nag emails. A daily editorial digest email tells each editor what needs attention today. A finished issue can be signed off and scheduled: it publishes itself at the set time. Editorial board members are invited through a proper People & Access flow with their roles attached, and standards checklists plus a public credibility page help a journal demonstrate, not just claim, that it meets recognised publishing norms.

Diamond, on principle

Publishing on Scholardemia means diamond open access: authors pay nothing to publish, readers pay nothing to read. There are no article-processing charges anywhere on the platform; the fees that elsewhere run to thousands per paper simply do not exist here. This is a condition of publishing on the platform, not a tier. The point of everything on this page, from the automated infrastructure to the built-in production and the one-product overhead, is to make that model affordable for any serious editorial team, not only for the ones with a publisher behind them.

Counted in the global record

Publishing is not just posting a PDF; it is joining the world's scholarly infrastructure, and this is where most small journals struggle. Scholardemia does it as a matter of course. Every article gets a DOI, the permanent identifier that makes a paper citable forever, registered through Crossref, the official global registry. Copies are archived at Zenodo, the CERN-backed repository, so the work survives independently. Article details flow to DOAJ, the directory libraries use to find trustworthy open-access journals. A standard feed (called OAI-PMH) lets library systems and search engines harvest your catalogue automatically. Author identities link to ORCID, the researcher ID system. And OpenAlex ties everything into the global citation graph. In plain terms: a paper published here is findable, citable, and preserved to the same standard as one from a major publisher.

Moving in without breaking links

Journals arriving from OJS, the most common journal software, bring their whole archive through a purpose-built migration bridge. Crucially, old article links keep working on the new site. Nothing in a journal's citation history goes dead. That single detail is where most migrations fail, and it is engineered here from the start. And the archive arrives with its people: historical authors get claimable profiles, and an invitation lets each one verify their identity by ORCID or email and take ownership of their publication record. A migrated journal brings its community, not just its PDFs.

A place to read

Around the machinery sits the readers' side: browse and search across articles, issues, and journals; league tables; latest-works streams; and usage statistics showing what is being read. Editors even get review-time analytics, keeping the journal honest about its own speed.

Connects to:Crossref (DOIs), Zenodo (archiving), DOAJ (indexing), OAI-PMH (library harvesting), ORCID (author identity), OpenAlex (citations), OJS (migration)

A full course platform where you build courses, teach them, grade them, and sell them, sitting inside the same world as the research the courses are about.

Build a course

Courses are structured into chapters and lessons, written in the same rich editor used across the platform, so course materials get proper formatting, images, and references, not a cut-down text box. Each course gets a designed landing page, composed with the drag-and-drop page builder, that sells or presents the course properly. Publishing is one action; the course appears in the catalogue.

Assess and grade

Assessments are built in: set assignments, receive student submissions, and work through them in a grading workbench designed for marking a whole cohort without losing your place. Students see their results in the course; instructors see completion at a glance.

Teach with insight

A teaching dashboard gathers your courses, and analytics show how learners are progressing: who is moving, who has stalled, and where in the material they stop. That is the feedback loop most university systems never quite deliver, and it is standard here.

Free or paid, your choice

A course can be open to all or sold. Payments run through the same Stripe checkout that powers event tickets, so an expert can offer a paid masterclass with no shop to build, no payment provider to negotiate, no extra accounts. Set the price, publish, and the commerce is done.

Learn at your own pace

Learners browse the catalogue, enrol, and move through chapters at their own speed, taking assessments along the way. Course reviews and ratings from past learners guide the next cohort's choices; learning preferences live in the learner's own settings.

Part of the whole

What makes this more than "an LMS bolted on" is the surroundings. A methods course cites the actual literature through the citation system. The instructor's credibility is one click away on a profile carrying real publications and metrics. A training course can live in the same workspace as the society's journal and annual conference: one membership, one audience, one place. Teaching stops being an annex to scholarly life and becomes one of its native activities.

Connects to:Stripe checkout, the rich editor, the page builder, researcher profiles, the citation system

A platform this broad is only usable if all of it is reachable from one box. Global Context Search is that box: one search across people, papers, events, courses, projects, data, and mail, available from anywhere in the product.

One box, every drawer

Type a query and the results organise themselves into tabs: people, publications, events, learning, projects, data, and more. Each tab searches its own domain the way that domain deserves (publications by scholarly detail, events by date and place, people by name and field) rather than dumping everything into one undifferentiated list. Filters within each tab narrow things further. Your mail has its own deep search across messages and conversations; the publications hub has its own bibliographic search; the global box routes you into each with your query intact.

Type @, find anyone

The same engine powers mentions. Type @ in a post, a comment, or a message, and it resolves people as you type, the quiet feature that makes a connected platform feel connected.

It respects boundaries

Search honours permissions everywhere. Private documents stay private. Workspace-internal material stays internal. Manuscripts under blind review stay invisible to anyone outside the review. And public journal websites carry their own separate search for their own visitors, cleanly apart from the signed-in experience. Powerful search and strict privacy are usually a trade-off; here they are the same design.

Why it compounds

Because one account spans eleven areas, one query can do what five systems used to. Search a colleague's name and you can reach: the person, their latest article, the conference session where they are presenting next month, the dataset behind their key figure, and the course they teach, all in one gesture. Every new thing anyone adds to the platform makes the search box more valuable, because it all lands in the same reachable world. That is the practical meaning of "one platform": not that the features share a login, but that they share a memory, and you can ask it questions.

Connects to:Every area of the platform, permission-aware results, @-mentions, separate visitor search on public journal sites

Eleven areas feel like one product because the ground under them is shared. These are the foundations you mostly never think about, which is the point.

One account, everywhere

You sign in once, with your email or with Facebook, and that single sign-in follows you across the main platform and onto every journal website it hosts, including journals on their own custom domains. Visit a society's site, and it already knows you; sign out once, and you are signed out everywhere. Accounts support two-step verification for safety and a second sign-in email for convenience, and every user can export their data or delete their account; their information is theirs. New members are met by a guided welcome: set up your profile, pick your fields of interest, and discover people and journals worth following, in a few friendly steps.

Own your address

Web addresses are a product feature, not a support ticket. Search for a domain, buy it, and the platform handles the technical wiring and the security certificate automatically; renewal reminders arrive before anything lapses. Email addresses on that domain follow. Your organisation's identity on the internet, website and email both, is set up in an afternoon, inside the same product that runs everything else.

Money, calendars, and AI

Payments across the platform (event tickets, course sales, domain purchases, premium plans) run on Stripe, one trusted rail rather than four separate arrangements. Calendars synchronise with Google Calendar, with availability and scheduling built in. AI assistance, wherever it appears, runs on keys that you or your workspace own: accounts with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, or Perplexity that you control. There is no opaque platform pool: your costs, your policies, your choice of provider, per person and per organisation.

The everyday glue

A shared topic system threads subjects through feeds, search, and profiles. The Data Hub lets you upload datasets, explore them interactively, build charts, and embed those charts anywhere, plus curated official data collections. A browsable directory of institutions connects universities and organisations to their people and publications. Notifications reach you in the app, on your phone, or by email, as you prefer; a weekly digest email can summarise your network's activity; and the whole platform installs like an app on your phone. Bookmarks save anything for later; badges recognise contribution; a built-in help centre answers the common questions; and operators can restyle the platform's look without redeploying it.

Free to join, fairly funded

Joining Scholardemia is free: a free account carries your profile, the community, and full discovery of research, events, and learning. Paid plans exist for those who want more capability: a personal Premium plan (with an introductory rate) adds premium identity tooling, custom domain and managed email options, and richer calendar and meeting integrations; Teams & Labs serves organisations running serious operations; and institutional arrangements cover whole universities. One line matters more than any price: publishing is not what is being sold. Journals here are diamond open access whatever anyone's plan. Scholardemia journals do not charge article processing charges (APCs). The paid plans fund the platform.

The integration roster

Zotero, ORCID, Canva, Zoom, Google Meet, Google Calendar, OJS, Crossref, DOAJ, Zenodo, OpenAlex, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Stripe: the connections are many, and each was chosen to meet scholars where they already are. But the experience is the opposite of a pile of integrations: one platform, one identity, one search box, and one inbox, for the whole life of scholarship.