Paperchase is a bespoke academic journal publication platform created for Impact Journals. The journal Aging has been publishing through Paperchase since Volume 8 in late 2016.

Impact Journals came to me for assistance with their existing publication platforms, both for Aging as well as their other journals, including Oncotarget. They had out-grown the platform that Aging was launched on, and needed help collecting and organizing their corpus while keeping up with their publication schedule.

Paperchase was built to solve the set of problems that academic publishers are challenged with:

• Article file intake and processing
• Article search indexing
• Article publication
• Issue publication
• Collecting, organizing and processing JATS XML files
• Rendering full-text HTML from imperfect legacy XML
• Quality control of manuscripts and XML
• Submission to PubMed, PubMed Central, Crossref and other indexing services

We have added features upon requests from the Impact Journals team over the years, while maintaining a tight focus on the core features that make Paperchase a powerful and flexible platform. Some of the services we've provided per request:

• Harvesting and processing of legacy XML and PDF documents
• Harvesting and processing of thousands of images locked in PDFs and other formats
• Online tools for editing and performing quality control on legacy files
• Automated generation of PDFs from collections of articles.
• Coordination with SEO and marketing teams to ensure that the platform is optimized for search engines
• Bespoke batch operations upon request
• Analytics and reporting of the corpus of articles

Paperchase was initially created as a MeteorJS application, but was later re-written as a NodeJS API and a collection of ReactJS applications. Both the serverside and client application are deployed to AWS using Docker and Terraform.

We have maintained a rock-bottom cost of operations by choosing our deployment methodologies carefully.