Blog

Website Branding

OpenScholar improves your online branding by creating website themes that can be used on all of your OpenScholar websites.

What is a website theme?
 

A website theme controls the look your website independent of content. A theme includes font types and sizes, colors and accents that affect the aesthetics of your site. Themes provide consistency and support wayfinding and user experience. 

We have a variety of available themes that can be customized to fit your school’s colors and logo to provide a consistent visual...

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Delighting Faculty

Our sites offer a clean and consistent way of displaying various kinds of content with the help of our content apps including a fantastic Publications App.
 publications app

The Publications App makes it easy to distribute your faculty’s scholarly works to repositories such as Google Scholar and RePEc. In a previous blog post, we explain how easy it is to add and customize publications on an OpenScholar website.  There is no lag time for citations published on your website, and you gain the exposure that Google Scholar and other repositories offers their users.... Read more about Delighting Faculty

How We Lower IT Costs

OpenScholar is a world-class web platform for higher education that can dramatically reduce your IT spending year-over-year.

When OpenScholar was developed and then fully adopted as the go-to web platform at Harvard University the intention wasn't to save the university $100M in web spend, but that's exactly what it did.1

 

How do we save YOU money?
 

1. OpenScholar is a complete academic platform
By using an academic feature focused platform in a department or across the entire campus, there is a limited need for one-off, custom and expensive website development projects. Save your IT staff from spending their time supporting, managing and maintaining those projects as well. Additionally, OpenScholar continues to improve and grow with our clients. These upgrades are automatically available to you at no additional charge.... Read more about How We Lower IT Costs

Our 4 Core Functions

OpenScholar is more than an average content management system. OpenScholar provides 4 core functions for university websites all on one unified platform:

  1. Faculty Profiles
    The OpenScholar platform promotes the web presence of faculty, department and schools. With a powerful search tool, we make it easy for site visitors to search (and find!) faculty expertise or research keywords. Our websites have the capability to be nested in a Parent-Child relationship allowing information to be pulled up to the department or school level from faculty sites. Site...
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OpenScholar + CMS platforms

Can OpenScholar work with other Content Management Systems on your campus?


The answer is Yes!
 

We frequently get asked how OpenScholar can work with platforms like WordPress, Drupal or even homegrown website platforms.

Across a single campus, there could be multiple content management systems (CMS) running different websites. This is very common but addressable issue.

Listen as our CEO,...

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Start with a Pilot

5 Easy Steps to Piloting OpenScholar

OpenScholar provides your school with a quick and cost-effective way to create academic-focused websites,  meet faculty needs and support strategic initiatives. Adopting OpenScholar campus wide or beginning with a pilot is easy, and with this 5 step implementation process it takes 30-45 days.

5 steps

Bringing an OpenScholar pilot to your campus:
 

  1. Contact OpenScholar
  2. Identify an internal evaluator
  3. Select a pilot Department 
  4. Work with us to create OpenScholar websites for your pilot group
  5. Get ready for roll-out

... Read more about Start with a Pilot

Accessibility & OpenScholar

What is Web Accessibility?

Accessibility involves two key issues:

  1. how users with disabilities access electronic information and
  2. how web content designers and developers enable web pages to function with assistive devices used by individuals with disabilities.

accessible speech bubble image exampleFor the user with a disability, the challenge is to identify tools that provide the most convenient access to web-based and other electronic information. For the web content designer/developer, the challenge is to remove the obstacles that prevent accessibility tools from functioning effectively. In many cases, these challenges are relatively simple to overcome, but sometimes the solutions require some additional thought and effort. (1)... Read more about Accessibility & OpenScholar

Publications & OpenScholar

As discussed in last week’s blog OpenScholar offers a simple and easy way to display published work. The platform gives users the ability to quickly add their most recent publications to their website and allows these publications to be automatically distributed to Google Scholar (if desired). This way, there is no lag time for citations published on your website, and you gain the exposure that Google Scholar offers their users. By streamlining this process, you can be sure your work is getting the visibility it warrants, which can help support and expedite your journey to tenure. Additionally, when people google you, or some of your publications, not only will your Google Scholar come up, but as will your OpenScholar website, allowing for further exploration of your work and your website.... Read more about Publications & OpenScholar