OpenScholar Expands to Serve Every University and Lifts Out of Harvard

BOSTON, Jan. 9, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- OpenScholar, an open source, website-publishing solution for higher education, today announced it has lifted out of Harvard University and is now a private company, OpenScholar LLC http://theopenscholar.com/home.  Founded by Harvard Professor Gary King and Jessica Drislane, the company's CEO, the software was first developed 8 years ago at Harvard by Professor King and a team of software engineers who have continuously refined the product. Today, OpenScholar's solutions enable faculty, students, and university departments to create high-quality, brand-enhancing websites, address 99% of academic website use cases, do it quickly, at low cost and on an enterprise-grade platform. http://theopenscholar.com/testimonials.

9,000 sites and 17,000 individuals at Harvard use OpenScholar today. 75 universities beyond Harvard use OpenScholar software because it saves schools millions of dollars in custom website development, eliminates website demand backlog, and elevates the professionalism of a university's online image. As the importance of each university's web presence increases and 'online' has become the primary portal for engagement with the world, the use of OpenScholar has spread.

Many trends in higher education--cloud hosting, IT cost-containment, vendor outsourcing, public engagement shifting online--contribute to the significant demand for OpenScholar beyond Harvard. By privatizing, OpenScholar can bring to every university:

--Better websites that improve university branding
--Lower IT costs
--Smarter features developed for academics by academics

There is no programming knowledge needed to build an OpenScholar website; it is DIY. Custom templates--tailored to a school's logos, colors and fonts-- professionalize the look and feel of websites, while maintaining brand consistency across a university and improving the visibility of faculty, scholars and departments.

"The best university websites convey information succinctly: they attract more applicants, more engagement, more research funding. Educators understand this immediately. Nothing else like this exists today--the ease of use combined with the fully structured data that underlies it are unique and powerful. This is the only system built for the enterprise--the management of an entire university's web ecosystem, branding, and visible intellectual property," says Jessica Drislane, CEO of OpenScholar, LLC.

"We designed OpenScholar to accomplish the goals of university communities," said Gary King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, "By automatically sending papers and publications to indexing services, OpenScholar ensures faculty and student work is cited by academics more and reaches audiences beyond the university more readily. By keeping information in an accessible content management system, departments with OpenScholar sites are visited much more frequently."

Bilsi Balakrishnan, the company's CTO says, "Now that we are a private company we can build upon what is already a mature product. We are excited about having the freedom to be more innovative."

For more information or to start your free, 30-day trial, visit us at http://theopenscholar.com/home.

Contact:
Jessica Drislane
[email protected]

SOURCE OpenScholar LLC