HighWire Press: 30 Years of Innovation in the Service of the Scholarly Community

Scholarly publishing has undergone significant change over the past three decades. From print to digital, from manual workflows to AI-supported systems, the pace of transformation has been steady and, at times, urgent.

Since 1995, HighWire has worked alongside publishers and societies through this evolution. What began as a project at Stanford University became one of the first platforms to move academic content online. Thirty years later, HighWire remains focused on building systems that support faster, more efficient, and more transparent publishing.

This post reflects on key milestones in HighWire’s journey and how it continues to support the scholarly ecosystem through content workflow software and publishing automation.

Built for Community

HighWire was launched to solve a specific problem: how to make scholarly content accessible online. In 1995, we hosted some of the first digital versions of academic journals, providing a foundation for what is now a globally adopted standard.

Over the years, HighWire led early developments in full-text search, Open Access publishing, and reference linking. As publishers expanded their digital portfolios, HighWire scaled alongside them—adding infrastructure for content hosting, identity access management, and integrated analytics.

From the beginning, its systems have been designed with the needs of scholarly publishers in mind: security, interoperability, compliance, and long-term sustainability.

John Sack Interview | HighWire Press

Infrastructure that supports scale and complexity

HighWire Hosting remains a core offering—supporting journals, books, MRWs, preprints, and hybrid content models. The platform is optimized for indexing, discoverability, and accessibility, with support for global compliance standards including COUNTER, KBART, WCAG, and LOCKSS / CLOCKSS.

The hosting environment is plug-and-play and built for scale. Publishers can manage large volumes of content across multiple formats including XML, videos, DCIM, and more. End users benefit from fast load times, responsive design, and integrated usage analytics.

For many publishers, HighWire is the system of record for published content. Its reliability and configurability allow teams to operate with confidence, and archiving abilities help to maintain legacy data safely with an option to retrieve it.

Streamlining workflows through automation

Over the past decade, HighWire has expanded beyond hosting into the full publishing lifecycle. Today, we work with our sister organizations – MPS Limited and AJE – to offer a full suite of content workflow software supporting editorial, production, and delivery functions from manuscript submission to final publication.

MPS brings additional automation capability. Through tools developed by MPSLabs, the workflow includes:

• Language and scientific editing
• AI-driven reviewer matching
• XML transformation and enrichment
• Rights management and validation

As a result, publishers using the full HighWire-MPS workflow have seen measurable improvements in turnaround time. One recent example: reducing the average submission-to-acceptance period by over 25 days.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Solutions from HighWire

Flexible, publisher-driven solutions

One of HighWire’s strengths is its publisher-agnostic, modular approach. The platform does not force a one-size-fits-all model. Instead, it integrates with existing infrastructure and adapts to different editorial policies, business models, and legacy systems.

This flexibility is a product of decades-long relationships with society publishers, academic institutions, and commercial presses. Many of these relationships have lasted 20+ years—not because the technology hasn’t changed, but because the focus has remained consistent: solve for the publisher’s needs first.

Whether a publisher is managing a handful of journals or a large-scale content portfolio, HighWire’s architecture supports growth without requiring wholesale change.

A broader ecosystem with MPS Limited

HighWire is part of MPS Limited, a global provider of publishing services and technology platforms. MPS brings scale—3,000+ professionals across 15 delivery centers—and deep domain expertise in scholarly and academic publishing.

Together, HighWire and MPS provide a true end-to-end solution:

• Pre-submission author services (editing, formatting, compliance)
• Submission and peer review management
• Production and enrichment
• Hosting, access control, analytics

Importantly, this integration is not locked down. Both companies operate with an open architecture philosophy. Customers can adopt the full stack or select components based on internal priorities.

Innovating for tomorrow

With publishers looking for solutions that offer automation, better interoperability, and faster time-to-publication. HighWire is actively developing solutions that meet these demands.

Investments in AI, machine learning, and natural language processing are already producing results—particularly in areas like metadata generation, content validation, and reviewer engagement. But technology alone is not the solution. HighWire’s approach is to apply these tools only where they deliver measurable gains.

This means testing before scaling, integrating with existing human workflows, and staying aligned with editorial standards.

Conclusion

For 30 years, HighWire has helped publishers respond to change—whether moving journals online in the ’90s, adopting Open Access in the 2000s, or building AI-supported workflows today.

Its continued relevance comes from understanding the complexity of academic publishing and designing systems that support, rather than disrupt, editorial and production teams.

As the expectations of researchers, authors, and funders continue to shift, publishers need infrastructure that is reliable, flexible, and built for long-term evolution. HighWire provides that infrastructure—combining content workflow software with publishing automation to improve outcomes at every stage.