HighWire introduces BenchPress Unlimited – a game changer for scholarly publishing

Manuscript Submissions are the lifeblood of scholarly publishing. Building on HighWire’s experience of supporting larger publishers with their submission and publishing workflow management, HighWire has introduced a new, simplified and intuitive version for publishers with low volume and straight-forward submission processes; BenchPress Unlimited.

One of the key commercial challenges for smaller publishers is the ability to forecast expenditures, BenchPress Unlimited offers an alternative pricing model that removes submission-based pricing. Instead, publishers now have the option to pay a single flat rate regardless of the number of submissions received; removing barriers to growth and leaving publishers free to scale their program. BenchPress Unlimited provides priority features without overwhelming authors, editors, and reviewers with more functionality than they need.

HighWire’s well-established submissions management tool is depended upon by some of the world’s pre-eminent scholarly publishers. It has become a highly valued part of their publishing systems architecture, enabling authors, reviewers, editorial and production staff, and external service providers, to submit, review content, update manuscript records and track workflow efficiency, through one central application.

Kevin-John Black, Product Lead for bioRxiv on behalf of Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, adds “We needed a fast, reliable and scalable system that used a streamlined approach that would allow for thousands of submissions. It was a natural fit for us to choose the flexibility of BenchPress as it was so well integrated with HighWire and our hosting services, which successfully tackled our business challenges and led to reduced costs and time saved.”

In addition to the new pricing, as a SaaS based offering, BenchPress Unlimited is fast to implement, so publishers quickly feel the benefit of the new capability. HighWire customers are also uniquely offered the addition of direct-to-developer support, enabling customers to speak directly to the engineer who makes the change.

Dan Filby, CEO, HighWire, adds “HighWire constantly strives to evolve with the needs of publishers and provide best-in-class services and solutions. We have a long and recognised history of working with larger publishers to develop highly customized solutions, and have been able to identify the most common and valued features to create a streamlined manuscript submission solution for smaller publishers. Having also identified submission-based pricing as one of the biggest pain-points currently facing smaller publishers, we introduced a transparent and predictable model with BenchPress Unlimited. We’re excited that this new pricing model helps drive business growth potential for the smaller publishers.”

About HighWire: The technology partner of choice for world-leading commercial and academic publishers. With offices globally, HighWire provides digital publishing solutions and platform expertise across all aspects of the publishing life cycle, including content management and hosting, e-commerce, analytics, access and identity management, manuscript submission and tracking. HighWire also delivers strategic consulting services for developing systems and applications and improving the customer experience.