What's new or currently rolling out

Research Hubs are here

OpenScholar Research Hubs pull scattered information from across research platforms, databases, and repositories into a single comprehensive record. These evergreen researcher profiles can be paired with OS Match and more to unlock funding and collaboration opportunities. 

We are working with the leadership of OpenScholar Web customers to create Hubs for eligible researchers in their network. If you’re interested in bringing Research Hubs to your organization, learn about our Research Hub pilot program.

New site creation workflow

We’ve added a new form that streamlines the process of starting a new site for Organization Administrators and other users with permission to create new sites. This will replace the modal windows you used to see when clicking “Add a new site” and provide us greater flexibility to enhance the site creation flow in the future. The old method of creating a site will be retired in the next few weeks.

If you have feedback about the new site creation process, let us know!

Redesigned calendars

Our calendars have received a major design update, making them fully responsive and compliant with the latest accessibility standards. You may notice a slightly different look and feel when looking at monthly/weekly/daily calendars. The calendar feature is available on sites that have the Events App enabled.

Improvements to PubMed automatic importer

We’ve made some adjustments to the PubMed automatic publication importer to make it more reliable and allow you to see the status of imports. If the import fails to run for any reason, it will check for new publications within a longer window, up to 30 days, instead of only the past 24 hours. And at the bottom of the import screen, you will see an activity log that shows when the site last checked PubMed, when it last added new publications, and the total number of articles added in the last 30 days.

Redesigned multiselect fields

When editing forms that allow you to select more than one item from a list of multiple options, you’ll notice the field has a slightly different appearance and interaction experience. We transitioned to a field plugin that is better maintained and more accessible for keyboard-only and screen reader users.

Maintenance, security, bug fixes and enhancements

Over the summer we completed a major upgrade for the Drupal Group module, which provides the backbone for our virtual site creation system (Drupal is the content management system underlying OpenScholar). We also completed several infrastructure updates to keep our systems secure and stable under the increased traffic load we are experiencing from AI agents and malicious bots.

We fixed several bugs and optimized settings in the authoring tools to make the platform even more accessible and user-friendly. And we applied security updates for Drupal core and several modules. We are on track to upgrade to Drupal 11 by the end of the year, when Drupal 10 will be end of life. We take care of the hosting and software, so you can focus on managing your content.

What’s coming soon

Redesigned widget layout panel

We are updating the design of the widget library so that it matches the rest of the admin theme and button colors reflect their purpose. We’re also improving the behavior of the “Reset” button. The page will be returned to its default layout, with no widgets in the content areas or sidebars, and the changes will not be saved unless you click “Save.” Clicking “Cancel” will restore the widgets to their previous state.

What’s being retired

Funding match emails based on websites

Starting in November 2026, Funding Match emails will be generated for individual researchers based on their OpenScholar Research Hub. This allows us to deliver matches that are more personalized to your specific career stage, research focus, and funding alignment. The website-based matching service will be discontinued. 

Researchers will receive invites to preview and update their new Research Hub when their organization joins the Hubs platform. Please contact support@theopenscholar.com to inquire about the transition timeline for your organization.

Old site creation workflow

The option to create a new site using the modal pop-up windows will be removed in the coming weeks, and all users will be required to use the new streamlined site creation form.

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.