What's new or currently rolling out

Generate image alt text with AI

Adding descriptive alt text (short for “alternative text”) to images is important for many audiences. Assistive technology uses it to explain what the image is to people who can’t see it. Search engines use it to index the image which affects both content- and image-based searches. And AI systems use it to learn what your site is about and what the image contains, which helps with answering questions and generating new images.

We’ve added a button so you can automatically add descriptive alt text to your images. Click it after uploading your image, and the alternative text field will be populated with suggested text after a few seconds.

Like any AI tool, this AI alt text generator can make mistakes. You can review the suggestion and make corrections. If the image is purely decorative, you can also check the box to indicate that and leave the alt text blank, so that you aren’t overwhelming users with useless information. And of course if you already have a description in mind, you can enter it without clicking the button.

ADA Title II and our accessibility strategy

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires all state and government-related websites to meet specific accessibility standards. These guidelines were originally set to be enforced by ADA Title II in April of 2026. That deadline was recently extended to April 2027. Here’s some great news: the OpenScholar platform is WCAG 2.1 compliant at level AA or higher. Read our blog post ADA Title II Compliance: Be Prepared for 2027 for more details about our commitment to accessibility and the role that site owners and content editors play in maintaining compliance.

Maintenance, security, bug fixes and enhancements

We fixed several bugs and optimized settings to make the platform even more accessible and user-friendly. We updated several software packages, Drupal core, and Drupal modules to keep things secure and running smoothly (Drupal is the content management system underlying OpenScholar). We take care of the hosting and software, so you can focus on managing your content.

What’s coming soon

Research Hubs + OS Match pilot

OS Match delivers high-confidence funding opportunities with AI-powered matching. OS Research Hubs are AI-generated, researcher-validated, evergreen faculty profiles that can be paired with OS Match and more to unlock funding and collaboration opportunities for researchers. Learn more about our 90-day pilot of OS Research Hubs with OS Match.

Keeping the same filename when replacing a file

We’re working on an enhancement that will allow you to replace a file with a new version without changing the filename. This means that direct links to those files will continue to work after they are updated, including links that may be published in documents or shared in places outside of their website.

AI-assisted content generation

Next on the list is adding AI assistance in rich text fields. We are exploring the addition of features like summarizing and drafting content, adjusting tone, and translating into other languages.

New theming system

We are continuing work on a new unified theme that will have a sleek modern design with institutional branding and more configurable options for headers, footers, and widget appearance. This will replace the standard themes that currently offer only minor visual variations and too much inconsistency in headers and footers. Please see the November 2025 Product Update for more details about the changes coming to our theming system.

What’s being retired

Importing RSS feeds

We are planning to retire the Blog and News RSS importers in the near future. Less than 20 site owners are using this feature across the thousands of sites hosted on OpenScholar. Many years ago this was a strategy for filling the news section on a site. Nowadays replicating content from other sites is discouraged. It hurts SEO and AI’s understanding of your organization’s purpose when you serve content authored elsewhere. 

RSS feeds remain a good source of content for feed readers where people want to view and browse articles from many sources. We will keep the option to make your site’s content available via RSS feed widget and Follow Me widget to support that usage. It’s only the importing function that will be retired.

Legacy themes

Reminder that legacy themes are not actively developed and support for them is limited. Users are encouraged to transition to one of the fully supported standard themes. To learn more about the difference between standard and legacy themes, please see our page on Theme Life Cycles.

Thanks for reading

Questions or comments? Please reach out to our product team at support@theopenscholar.com.