CACTUS – Academic Journal Platform for ASE Bucharest
A full-stack platform running CACTUS journal's entire submission, peer-review and publishing workflow.
The Challenge
CACTUS ran on a WordPress site with a dated design, where submitting, reviewing and publishing articles and volumes was a slow, largely manual process. Neither the editorial workflow nor the public-facing site were built for the journal's specific peer-review needs, making every step harder than it had to be.
Our Solution
We replaced the WordPress site with a custom full-stack platform on the T3 stack (Next.js, tRPC, Prisma/PostgreSQL) that streamlines the whole lifecycle — author submission with file validation, double-blind peer review with configurable review forms, multi-round plagiarism checking, and editorial assignment and decisions — reducing the time to submit, review and publish an article or volume. It also delivers a modern public journal site (issues, archives, editorial board, policies) with role-based access control, notifications, an email queue, backups and analytics.