4 December 2025
Scholastica has announced that its peer review system now supports transferring manuscripts between journals within a publisher’s portfolio (a.k.a. cascading submissions).
Publishers can configure the new feature to allow editors to offer authors the opportunity to have their manuscript transferred to another eligible journal in their portfolio, in cases where a submission seems better suited to an alternate title. Publishers set the parameters for which journals can offer transfers and the direction of transfers.
Scholastica designed its new manuscript transfer feature to be as intuitive and seamless as possible. Transferred manuscripts include all metadata from the first submission, the author’s original submission form inputs, any new submission fields the transfer journal requires, the decision letter issued by the transferring journal, and applicable peer review details. Reviewers for journals that have enabled manuscript transfer are asked to indicate transfer permissions at the end of review forms they complete, including whether they consent to having their comments transferred to another journal and if they consent to having their identity disclosed.
Offering manuscript transfers as appropriate benefits all parties involved by giving authors another chance at acceptance without requiring them to prepare and upload a new submission, and repurposing the work of those who initially assessed the manuscript.
“Manuscript transfers help publishers operate more efficiently and create added value for authors submitting to a journal in a portfolio, but the option hasn’t always been accessible to smaller organizations due to high legacy software costs and complexity,” said Scholastica’s CEO and Co-Founder Brian Cody. “Scholastica’s new Manuscript Transfer functionality is a milestone in our efforts to enable organizations of any size to run journal programs at the same level as large commercial publishers but at a fraction of the cost and without technical headaches.”
The new manuscript transfer feature is available to publishers with two or more related journals using Scholastica’s Peer Review System. We provide more details on how to set up manuscript transfers and how the feature works in this blog post.