OpenScholar is less suited for:
- High-traffic flagship or marketing-critical sites like pitt.edu that require advanced user interaction and a high degree of flexibility.
The Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Research offers research centers and institutes the opportunity to work with OpenScholar, a Pitt-approved vendor platform, to build and host websites.
OpenScholar’s user-friendly interface allows site owners to define site-wide default layouts and create unique layouts for individual sections. The platform provides professional, help-desk–style support and robust, regularly updated documentation.
Example Use Cases
OpenScholar is targeted for use by recognized research centers and institutes. Examples of Pitt sites using an OpenScholar template are:
Template Options
The OpenScholar platform offers five template options. Please select the template that best fits your site’s purpose before submitting your request. OpenScholar sites include preconfigured content types for news, events, publications, blogs, FAQs, and slideshows, along with social sharing tools and built-in analytics to track site traffic.
Key Features & Benefits
Each OpenScholar website has a $420 annual cost. That cost will be equally shared among the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Research, the Center or Institute, and the School in which that Center or Institute is located.
All OpenScholar websites are intended to adopt the naming convention of: researchsites.pitt.edu/text-you-choose. This naming convention provides search engine optimization and all URLs will be migrated over to that format.
If you wish to keep an existing URL custom domain, it is possible but incurs a $300 annual charge that your Center or Institute would be responsible for paying. OpenScholar charges this $300 set-up fee and then a $300 annual fee thereafter to cover the cost of validating the certificate for each center-branded domain.
University units may publish sites quickly while avoiding costly custom development and ongoing technical updates.
View the OpenScholar training videos to learn more about how to best build your site.
OpenScholar templates ensure use of consistent headers, footers, and colors across all sites.
Not sure how to design your page layout or what each widget looks like? OpenScholar provides a widget example documentation that lets you preview all available widgets. Explore your options and decide which design works best for your page.
The OpenScholar platform fully supports Google Analytics, which allows you to keep track of website visits, demographic information, most popular pages, and many other website metrics. Understanding your website analytics is crucial in ensuring that your website goals are successful. It can also be valuable tool for monitoring and revising specific content strategies. In addition, Google Analytics gives you access to a robust selection of reports which can be emailed to you on a scheduled basis.
OpenScholar templates are designed to meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards.