Jeff Coghill, MA, MLIS, CAS-HSL 
Outreach Librarian & Director, Eastern AHEC Library Services 
Laupus Library 
East Carolina University 

Carenado Davis, PhD, MLS  
Dean of Library Services 
Wake Tech Community College 

This is an update of our review of HighWire, formerly known as HighWire Press, which was published in Doody’s Collection Development Monthly in September 2015. You can find the original review here. 

Overview 

Since our last review, a lot has changed at HighWire. The company was acquired in 2020 and is now powered by MPS Limited, a leading global provider of platforms, content, and learning solutions for the digital world. MPS was originally established as an Indian subsidiary of Macmillan (Holdings) Limited in 1970 and became independent. Today, more than 2,700 professionals power MPS across seven delivery centers in India, four offices in Europe, and six client-servicing offices in the U.S. HighWire users may be familiar with other MPS resources such as bioRxiv and medRxiv, preprint servers for research that are now a part of the academic publishing ecosystem. 

Features/Functionality 

HighWire has jumped into the world of larger publishers to offer a complete suite of resources from individual article processing to hosting e-journal titles or ebook titles on a permanent basis. What was once a smaller academic publisher of select titles now offers more than just e-journal hosting services. Today, HighWire is an industry-leading global provider of digital publishing tools and platform solutions across all aspects of the publishing life cycle, including content management and hosting, e-commerce, analytics, access and identity management, manuscript submission, and tracking. 

According to their website, HighWire currently offers the following products configured to clients’ unique publishing needs: 

Ampere 

Ampere is a cloud-based workflow management engine, designed to simplify the complexity of managing production of large amounts of content including articles, journals, and books. Publishing, production, and editorial staff can track and manage manuscripts centrally in the cloud with ease and scale, allowing for operational agility in a rapidly changing publishing world.  

BenchPress 

Revolutionizing manuscript and submission tracking, BenchPress is configured to clients’ unique workflow needs to simplify and streamline the manuscript submissions process, helping to increase efficiency, decrease costs, and dramatically reduce time to publication. BenchPress is designed to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the scholarly community, letting users easily make changes to reflect unique editorial practice and peer-review processes. 

JCore 

Journal sites designed to get readers what they need in as few clicks as possible. JCore was designed by publishers for publishers, offering a modern, intuitive journal-hosting platform that offers powerful content ingestion, enrichment, and publishing infrastructure for journal sites, along with custom theming and self-operable tools. 

Scolaris 

A content platform that’s as unique as you are. Scolaris is a next-generation multi-content hosting platform, integrating books and journals seamlessly with multimedia content, videos, spreadsheets, case studies, news, and tutorials. 

Sigma 

Simple, flexible access control and identity management. Sigma is a true authentication system, supporting complex hierarchical relationships among publishers and institutions to provide centralized access and identity management to licensed content. 

THINK 

A one-stop solution to handle all kinds of orders and payments. THINK is an end-to-end, cloud-based customer service and order management platform. It streamlines business processes by improving order accuracy, managing product lifecycle, and automating renewals, along with providing flexible fulfillment and inventory management services. 

Vizor 

Rapid insight for data-driven, evidence-based editorial and business decisions. Vizor is an award-winning data visualization tool that gives rapid insight into the reach and impact of scholarly content, allowing trends, meaning, and context to be uncovered. 

Insights 

View usage analytics in one platform. Insights provides information about the usage of the scholarly content of various publishers by fetching data from various platforms. It strives to be platform-independent so that publishers can leverage the benefits of content usage analytics without being deterred by the hosting platform. 

DigiEdit 

Intelligent web-based editing with underlying XML. Publishing workflow often requires multi-stakeholder editing, proofing, review, and revision. This process generates multiple copies of a manuscript and requires careful compilation of all edits, which can be time consuming. DigiEdit solves this problem by providing an efficient, collaborative editing environment optimized for the scholarly community. It is suitable for academic, educational contents; reports; loose-leaf documents; and other contents. 

Business Model 

HighWire hosts the publication output of many recognizable e-journal imprints: BMJ, Bioscientifica, Bloomsbury, Brill, Cabi, Taylor & Francis, University of California Press, Wiley, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Royal Society Publishing, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Penguin Random House, Palgrave Macmillan, Oxford University Press, American Society for Microbiology, McGraw Hill, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), IOS Press, and the American Medical Association (AMA). 

Breakthrough 

HighWire has matured from simply an online hosting service with humble beginnings into a mature online hosting service offering multiple products to meet any user’s needs. Librarians and publishers would benefit from using HighWire’s suite of services. Librarians can direct potential new journal imprints, that is, researchers or faculty who wish to start a new journal, to HighWire to meet the needs of a new publication. Researchers benefit from the “one-stop shop” convenience of starting a new journal, hosting ongoing issues, and archiving all in one place. Finally, if librarians wish to start their own journal on any given librarianship topic, they will be able do so with HighWire. 

References

https://www.highwirepress.com/about-us/

https://www.highwirepress.com/solutions-test/