Computer Support Blog

Academic journals require more effort to manage properly than many people outside the academic and research worlds realize.  Managing the process of peer reviews, organizing all submitted research, designing the layout of the journal and finding a means of publication are all very time-consuming activities.  To further complicate the matter, most academic and research journal editors work full time jobs at universities on top of their editorial duties.  Now, cool person in technology Brian Cody has founded a company that wants to help journal editors manage their duties more efficiently.  Scholastica is Cody’s platform for creating and maintaining academic journals online.  With Scholastica, editors can keep track of all works submitted to their journal, manage the peer review process in real time, and publish approved papers quickly and efficiently.  Cody’s goal is to provide professional academics with the tools to maintain a high quality journal online easily.  He also wants academics to be able to do so without needing extensive technical expertise.  Any academics who have difficulty publishing with the platform should make sure to contact a remote computer support service. Read more »

Anna Lewis left her government job as a policy advisor in 2008 to pursue her personal interest in entering the publishing world.  However, this cool person in technology didn’t take the traditional path and apply for jobs at major book publishers or even small presses.  Instead, she used technology to tackle book publishing from a different angle and launched CompletelyNovel, her first tech startup.  CompletelyNovel provided authors a platform for communication, advice, and self-publishing—all via the web.  Lewis worked on CompletelyNovel with her business partner Oliver Brooks for several years, expanding the site’s features and user base before deciding that what they were doing wasn’t enough.  Lewis apparently wasn’t satisfied with just changing how people publish books with the web, but also how people purchase and read eBooks online.  That’s why she founded ValoBox in 2011, a company that allows users to pay for cloud-based eBooks by chapter or even by page if they so desire.  Those who have ever needed a computer data recovery to retrieve lost eBooks on their hard drive will see the possible benefits of the ValoBox service.  Both of Lewis’s startups leverage the Internet to provide new models for the book industry on both the publishing and consumer sides.  Read more »