Alfred Scholar Release Notes

Mark a manuscript Final, open the Reviewers panel, and add Alfred alongside the people you invited. It reviews citation integrity, claims against the sources they cite, argument and method, and writing, and files what it finds in a triage panel you accept or dismiss.

Peer review has always meant waiting. You finish a draft, hand it to your guide or a colleague, and the mechanical problems sit in the manuscript until someone with a week of their own work finds time to read it: a citation marker pointing at a source you deleted months ago, the same paper entered twice under two records, a sentence that claims rather more than the paper behind it does. Alfred can now sit on that reviewer list alongside the people you invited.

What changed

• Alfred is a reviewer, not a button. Mark a manuscript Final, open the Reviewers panel, and add Alfred the way you add anyone else. It reads the whole manuscript and reviews it the way a reviewer does.
• Citation integrity, record by record. Markers pointing at a source that no longer exists, the same paper cited twice under two records, DOIs that do not resolve, a manuscript that cites sources but carries no reference list, and citation styles that drift between two forms. For a reference list you typed by hand, it also finds entries you never cited and in-text markers with no matching entry.
• Claims read against the sources they cite. For a claim that cites a source, Alfred reads the source and says one of three things: the source supports the claim, the claim goes further than the source does, or the source does not support it.
• Argument and method, one section at a time. Claims asserted without support, conclusions the evidence does not reach, contradictions between sections, design choices left unjustified, limitations that are missing, assumptions never stated.
• The writing checks you already had. Spelling that drifts between two forms, jargon with a plain equivalent, genuinely wordy phrasing, phrasing that reads as AI, typography, and abbreviations used before they are defined.
• A triage panel, not a flood of comments. Findings arrive grouped by category and by severity (must fix, should fix, consider) rather than landing in your threads. Accept the ones worth keeping and each becomes a real comment thread anchored to its passage. Dismiss the rest and the manuscript is untouched.
• Numbered rounds you can compare. Every run is a round, stamped with the manuscript version it read. Round two sits beside round one, so you can see what you fixed.
• A coverage panel for what was not checked. Alfred can only check a citation when it can reach the source: the paper is in your library, or it is open access, or its abstract is reachable. When none of those hold, the citation is listed as unchecked and Alfred produces no finding about it.
• No seat, and no score. Alfred does not take one of your paid reviewer seats, and the review carries no score and no verdict. It is a review to read and judge, like any other.

Why

The expensive part of peer review is not the reading, it is the waiting, and a good deal of what comes back was mechanical all along. A supervisor’s one careful pass should not be spent on a DOI that does not resolve, or on a sentence that claims more than the paper it cites. Those findings can be produced before anyone human opens the file, which leaves the reader with a draft where the only things left are the ones that need judgement.

That is also why the coverage panel exists. Alfred reviews the citations it can actually read. A paper behind a publisher’s paywall, with no copy in your library and no abstract to work from, is a paper Alfred has not read, and the review says so instead of producing a confident finding about a source it never saw. This is the same discipline as the originality check, which searches open-access literature and the open web and states plainly that it does not search paywalled journal archives. A review you can trust is one that tells you where it stopped looking.

Run it before you take the draft to your guide or the journal, not instead of them.

Alfred as a reviewer is available on the Pro and Lab plans: 3 review rounds a month on Pro, 10 on Lab.

Open a draft manuscript, run Viva Prep, and Alfred reads the whole thing and drafts the questions an examining committee would put to you, answering each one from your own sections. The result is filed as a note you can keep working on.

Preparing for a viva has meant leaving your workspace, pasting chapters into a general chatbot, and getting back questions with no connection to what you actually wrote. Viva Prep does it inside Alfred Scholar, against the manuscript itself.

What changed

• One action in the manuscript editor. Viva Prep sits in the checks bar of a draft manuscript, next to Guidelines, AI Writing Check, and Spelling. Run it and Alfred reads the whole manuscript.
• Questions grouped the way a committee thinks. Motivation and contribution, literature and positioning, methodology and design, results and analysis, limitations and validity, implications and future work. The same six themes every time, so a second run is comparable to the first.
• Every answer names the section it came from. Not a general answer about your field, but one drawn from your own writing, with the heading it rests on, so you can go and check it.
• It says so when your manuscript does not answer a question. The questions you cannot yet answer are the most useful thing on the list, and they are marked as such rather than filled in with something invented.
• The result is a note, not a panel. Viva Prep files the questions into a Viva Prep folder in your Second Brain, where you can annotate them, link them, and come back the week before the defence.
• Running again refreshes the same note. No duplicates piling up in your notebook. If you have edited the note yourself since the last run, Alfred asks before replacing it.

Why

A viva is an oral defence of work you spent years on, and the preparation for it is mostly a matter of anticipating where someone will push. That is a question about your manuscript, not about your field in general, so the answers have to come from your manuscript. Everything here is traceable back to a section you wrote, because an answer you cannot locate in your own thesis is not an answer you can give in the room.

Viva Prep is available on the Pro and Lab plans.

A Telescope column that had found its answer could still settle as failed. It no longer does. Offline drafts also recover on their own if the browser drops the connection mid-session.

Three reliability fixes, all of them cases where Alfred had the answer and lost it on the way to you.

Telescope columns no longer fail on work that succeeded

A Telescope cell could read “We could not extract this column” even when the extraction had gone perfectly and every claim, quote and page reference was ready. The answer was there; the step that hands it over rejected it and marked the cell failed. Re-running it produced the same result, which made the column look genuinely impossible rather than merely stuck.

Those columns now come through with their claims intact. Nothing about how strictly we check the evidence has loosened: a column that truly has nothing to report still says so honestly, and a column we cannot verify still refuses to invent one. If you have an analysis with a failed column, re-run it and it should fill in.

Offline drafts recover on their own

If your browser closed its connection to the offline store partway through a session, which can happen when a second tab opens or the browser reclaims space in the background, the workspace kept accepting your edits without actually saving them offline. The pending-changes indicator went on saying work was queued while nothing was being written.

The workspace now notices and reconnects on its own. Your writing keeps being saved, and what you had already written was never at risk.

Slow sources fail instead of hanging

When Zotero, Mendeley or a paper host went unresponsive, a request could sit waiting long enough to time the whole page out, giving you an error with nothing in it. Those calls now give up on their own and tell you which source did not answer, so you can retry that one thing rather than the whole action.

What changed

Pro and Lab can be bought from anywhere, priced in US dollars outside India. Outside India, a 7-day trial starts without a card and settles onto a free plan rather than locking you out.

Until today, Alfred Scholar could be used from anywhere but bought only from India. That gap is closed. Pro and Lab are now on sale worldwide, priced in Indian Rupees in India and in US dollars everywhere else.

• Pro is $19 a month or $190 a year outside India. In India it stays ₹899 a month and ₹8,999 a year.
• Lab, which covers a supervisor and four researchers, is $99 a month or $990 a year outside India, and stays ₹4,499 a month and ₹44,999 a year in India.
• Annual billing saves roughly a sixth against paying monthly, in both currencies.
• The pricing page and your billing page now quote the currency you will actually be charged in, rather than showing rupees to everyone.

Trials differ by region, on purpose

In India the trial is unchanged: ₹48 for three days of full Pro, continuing as Pro unless you cancel.

Outside India, a new account gets 7 days of full Pro without entering a card. When the week is up, nothing is locked and nothing is charged. The workspace settles onto a free plan and keeps working, with lighter limits on documents and questions. Upgrading is a decision you can make in your own time, or not at all.

We split the two deliberately. A small real charge is a fair signal in a market that knows us; asking a stranger for a card before they have read a single paper is not.

The free plan

The free plan is not a locked screen. Your library, your citations and your reference sync keep working. What it limits is volume: a few documents and a modest number of questions a month. If you outgrow it, Pro is there.

Prices in India have not moved

If you are in India, nothing about what you pay has changed with this release.

Three days of full Pro access for ₹48, which continues as Pro unless you cancel. The Founding Scholar lifetime edition is closed.

Three days of full Pro access now cost ₹48, and they continue as Pro when the three days are up. It is a small change with a simple reason behind it: a trial that ends by locking you out is a bad moment to hand someone in the middle of a chapter.

What changed

• The Pro trial is ₹48 for 3 days. It is still complete Pro access, not a reduced version of it.
• When the three days end, the workspace continues on Pro at ₹899 a month. Nothing pauses, and nothing turns read-only mid-sentence.
• Cancel any time during the three days and nothing further is charged. Your access still runs to the end of the third day.
• Your billing page names the exact date the monthly plan begins, so the charge is never a surprise.
• One trial per person, as before.

The Founding Scholar edition is closed

All one hundred numbered seats were claimed. The edition is no longer on sale.

If you hold a seat, nothing changes for you. Your Pro access is permanent, there is no renewal to miss, and your seat number stays on your billing page exactly as it was.

Outside India

Alfred Scholar is sold in India today, priced in Indian Rupees. You can use it from anywhere; what we do not have yet is a way to take payment from outside India. Institutions anywhere can still be set up directly on Campus. Write to

[email protected]

and we will arrange access.

A note on testimonials

An approved testimonial now adds a day of Pro rather than a week. With the trial itself costing ₹48, a week of free Pro had quietly become the cheaper way in, which was never the point of asking for one.

The whole app now shares one refined palette with our website, every tool keeps a single signature color everywhere it appears, and the interface type has been upgraded for long reading sessions.

Alfred Scholar’s workspace has been retuned end to end so the app, the website, and every email you receive from us speak the same visual language.

What changed

• Each tool now keeps one signature color everywhere it appears. Loops is always its warm red, Citations its amber-orange, Telescope its green, Ask Alfred its teal, Second Brain its sky blue, whether you see them in the sidebar, a page header, the command palette, or an upgrade card. No more spotting the same feature in two different colors on one screen.
• Dark mode moved from a blue-tinted night to calm neutral greys, the same dark canvas as our website, which is easier on the eyes over long sessions.
• Buttons, links, and focus outlines settled on one deeper, steadier blue with clearer contrast in both themes.
• The interface typeface was upgraded, and code and citation keys now render in a proper monospaced face instead of borrowing the text font.
• Exported PDFs, plagiarism reports, and transactional emails were retuned to the same palette, so what leaves the app matches what you see inside it.
• The command palette can now jump straight to Telescope and Loops.

What stays the same

Nothing moved and no feature changed. This is a consistency pass: the product simply agrees with itself, from the first pixel of the loading screen to the last page of an exported PDF.

Every page now shows what comes next, one name for the trial, and a trial button that follows you on mobile.

The marketing site had grown page by page, and it showed. Pages that talked about what a plan includes had no way to reach the plans. Comparison pages sat in one corner, feature pages in another, and nothing led between them. On a phone, the only way to start a trial was to open the menu and scroll to the bottom.

What’s new

• Every page shows what comes next - the foot of each feature, comparison and audience page now offers three routes: somewhere to go deeper, a comparison against the tool you already use, and the plans.
• Pricing is reachable from anywhere - it now sits in the footer and at the close of every page, instead of only in the top navigation.
• One name for the trial - the button said twenty-one different things depending on where you found it. It now says the same thing everywhere: start your 3-day trial.
• A trial button on mobile - once you have read past the opening, a slim bar keeps the price and the trial within reach. It can be dismissed, and it stays out of the way on the pricing and contact pages.
• A comparison hub you can navigate - the ten comparisons are now grouped by the kind of tool you are replacing, so you can start from what is on your desk today.
• Clearer comparison pages - each one now carries a breadcrumb, a date on the competitor pricing it quotes, and a link into the features it discusses.

Fixed

• The quick-start guide linked to a sign-up page that did not exist.
• Comparison pages listed a browser extension as coming soon. It is not on the roadmap, so the tables no longer say it is.
• Headings on the comparison pages were a size smaller than the rest of the site, and the pricing page was missing its structured data for frequently asked questions.

Search your library and Alfred now looks across arXiv, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Crossref and Shodhganga too, so you can save what you are missing without leaving the page.

Until now, searching your library could only tell you what you already had. If you owned nothing on a topic, you got an empty page and had to go looking somewhere else.

What’s new

• Papers you do not have yet - search your library and results from arXiv, OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, Crossref and Shodhganga appear underneath your own documents, each one labelled with where it came from.
• Save without leaving - when an open-access PDF is available, save it straight into your library and pick a folder on the way in. It begins processing immediately, ready to read, cite and chat with.
• Honest about what you can reach - papers with no open-access PDF are marked as such rather than quietly dropped, so you can still follow them to the source.
• Find your own papers by their real title - library search now matches a paper’s published title and DOI, not just the filename. Something you uploaded as scan_001.pdf is findable by its actual name.

Also fixed

A search that matched nothing in your library could show an empty page instead of saying so. It now tells you plainly, and points you to what was found elsewhere.

Why this matters

Research rarely starts from what you have already filed. Searching once, seeing both what you own and what exists, and filing the useful ones in the same motion keeps you in one place, instead of moving between your library, a search engine and a publisher’s site to answer a single question.

Your own deployment

A page for the part of Campus we never wrote down: your institution's own deployment, your own database, sign-in rules you control, and originality checks scoped to your own cohort.

Campus has been on the pricing page for a while, described as Lab scaled to your institution: more seats, central billing, onboarding, priority support. All true, and all of it undersold the part institutions actually ask about first.

There is now a Campus page that says the rest.

A Campus agreement can run Alfred Scholar as a separate installation in a cloud account of its own, with its own database and its own file storage. It shares nothing with the public service and nothing with any other institution.

That also means the numbers stop being a price list. Seats, the daily AI message allowance, document limits, originality checks, and Telescope runs are set by the agreement, and can be changed later without waiting for a release.

Your own front door

Sign-ups on a Campus instance can be closed entirely, capped at an agreed number of accounts, or restricted to your institution’s email domains. Google sign-in can be switched off, so the only way in is the one your IT team approves.

There is no payment screen on a licensed instance either. Nobody in your department is asked for a card, and no upgrade prompts appear anywhere, because the entitlement comes from the agreement.

Originality, scoped to your cohort

This is the part that changes in kind rather than in degree, and it is the reason the page exists.

On the public service, an originality check compares a manuscript against work across every workspace on the platform. On a dedicated instance the only work on the platform is yours, so the same check becomes a comparison across your own students and your own department. Nothing written there is compared against, or visible to, anyone outside it.

Reports show which passages overlap and where the match came from, so a supervisor can read the evidence and judge it. That is what it is for: a starting point for a conversation, not a score to act on by itself.

Also in this release

While writing the page we went back through the billing documentation and corrected two things that were wrong.

The AI message allowance was described as monthly. It has always been daily, and it is one shared budget across Ask Alfred, voice dictation, and the manuscript rewrite and humanise assists. That distinction did not matter when the daily figure was unreachable; it matters now.

The docs also offered a GST invoice and a place to enter a GSTIN. Neither exists, and Alfred Scholar is not GST-registered, so the prices you see are simply the full amount charged. Every payment sends an email receipt, which covers most reimbursement processes. If your finance office needs something else, write to us and we will sort it out.

Campus enquiries, as always, go to [email protected].

Pro now includes 50 AI messages a day and Lab 150. The old limits were never stated accurately, and the message you see when you reach one now tells you the truth.

Alfred Scholar has always had a daily allowance on AI messages. It was set so high that almost nobody reached it, which had two unfortunate effects: some of our pages described messages as “unlimited” when they never were, and the notice you saw on reaching the limit was wrong about when you would get access back.

Both are fixed, and the allowance itself has changed.

What the allowance is now

• Pro: 50 AI messages a day
• Lab: 150 AI messages a day

Your allowance resets each day. Documents, citations, and manuscripts remain genuinely unlimited on both plans, as they always have been.

What counts toward it

The allowance is shared across the three places Alfred does the heavy thinking: chatting in Ask Alfred, voice dictation, and rewriting or humanising text in a manuscript. That has always been true, and it is worth saying plainly now that the number is one you might actually meet during a long day.

If you need more

Connect your own AI key under Settings and the daily allowance is lifted entirely. Your chat then runs on your provider account, at your rates. Embeddings and originality checks stay on Alfred Scholar’s shared engine either way.

Why the change

Running these models has a real cost per message, and an allowance nobody could reach is not an allowance, it is an open tap. Looking at how the desk is actually used, a typical research day sits comfortably inside the new numbers, and the heaviest single day we have on record would still have fit within Lab’s.

We would rather set an honest limit, say so on the pricing page, and keep the plans affordable than quietly absorb an unbounded bill and price for it later.

Every check compares your manuscript against platform documents, open-access research, and the public web, and reports the UGC 2018 level alongside the percentage. Lab moves from unlimited checks to 20 a month.

Originality checks used to compare your manuscript against documents on Alfred Scholar and open-access research databases. They now search the public web as well, and the report is graded the way an Indian institution grades it.

What changed

• The public web is now checked. Distinctive phrases from your manuscript are searched as exact quotes, and any page that contains them is compared properly rather than skimmed. Every web match carries its link, so you can open the page and judge it yourself.
• Reports show the UGC 2018 level. Level 0 through Level 3 now sits alongside the percentage, calculated after quoted material and the bibliography are excluded, which is how the regulations intend it to be read.
• A writing signal sits beside the similarity score. It counts stock academic phrasing and reports a density. It is a prompt to reread those sentences, not a claim about how the manuscript was written, because nothing in a text can establish that.
• The exported PDF states its own method. It names every source that was actually checked, and says plainly that Alfred flags runs of 8 shared words where the regulations permit ignoring 14. Your percentage may therefore read higher than your university’s checker on the same manuscript, and the report explains why rather than leaving you to defend a number you cannot account for.

Lab moves from unlimited to 20 checks a month

Unlimited made sense when a check ran entirely on your own machine’s worth of arithmetic and cost nothing to run. Searching the live web costs money on every check, so the plan now includes 20 originality checks a month. Pro stays at 1.

We would rather change the number and say so than quietly degrade the checks themselves.

What has not changed

Your manuscript is still never stored as a source, never indexed, and never added to any database. It cannot turn up in someone else’s report. Matches against another researcher’s private document still show a name and a percentage only, and never a word of their text.

We still do not search paywalled publisher archives, and we do not claim to detect paraphrasing. An originality check is a prompt to confirm your quoting and citation, not a verdict.

Paste an image straight into a manuscript, wrap text around it, caption it, and have it come out in the PDF.

Placing a figure in a manuscript used to mean uploading a file, accepting wherever it landed, and hoping it survived the export. It now works the way the rest of your writing does.

Paste, drag, place

Copy an image from anywhere and paste it into the manuscript. Drag one in from your desktop and it lands where you dropped it. Once it is on the page you can pick it up and move it, the same as any other block.

Selecting a figure brings up its options: size it to a quarter, half or three quarters of the writing measure, choose whether text breaks around it or wraps down one side, and set where it sits on the line. Wrapping is real wrapping, so the paragraph flows beside the figure rather than around a gap. On a narrow screen a wrapped figure goes full width instead of squeezing the text into a column two words wide.

There is a red delete control where you would expect one, and a description field for the alternative text a screen reader will read out.

Captions, without leaving the figure

The same bar offers “Add caption”. One click puts a numbered caption directly beneath the figure with the cursor already in it, ready to type. Tables and displayed equations have the same option, and all three number themselves: Figure 1, Table 1, Equation 1, renumbering as you add and remove them.

Figures in your export

Images now render in exported PDFs and in print. Previously an export could arrive with a blank space where the figure should have been. If an image genuinely cannot be reached, the export says so in place rather than leaving a silent gap.

A toolbar that stays out of the way

The toolbar is now a band above the page rather than a translucent layer floating on top of it. Jumping to a heading from the outline lands the heading in view instead of behind the controls, and menus for tables and images no longer fight with the toolbar for the same strip of screen.

Quieter saving

Alfred keeps a copy of unsaved edits on your device so nothing is lost if your connection drops. Occasionally that queue could hold on to an edit belonging to a manuscript you had already deleted, and keep announcing that it could not be saved. Those edits are now cleared, and a save that is interrupted midway is picked up again rather than left in limbo. The result is fewer notifications, and none that ask you to wait for something that is never going to happen.

Get into your workspace with your Google account, with no password to invent and no verification email to wait for.

You can now sign in to Alfred with your Google account.

One step instead of three

“Continue with Google” sits on both the sign-in and sign-up screens. Choosing it takes you to Google, and brings you straight back into your workspace.

For a new account that means no password to invent and no verification email to wait for: Google has already confirmed your address, so we do not ask you to confirm it again. Your workspace and trial are set up the same way they always were.

It joins your existing account

If you already have an Alfred account and your Google address matches it, signing in with Google simply opens that account. Nothing is duplicated, your library is exactly where you left it, and your password keeps working if you would rather use it.

Two-step verification still applies. If you have it switched on, Google gets you through the first step and your authenticator app handles the second, as before.

If you only ever use Google

Accounts created through Google do not have a password, and nothing in Alfred will insist on one. You can add a password later from Settings if you want a second way in, and you can keep using Google either way.

Click any citation once to open its options, remove a reference without hunting for it, and find the writing tools where you expect them.

Two small frictions in the manuscript editor, both fixed.

Citations answer the first click

Clicking an in-text citation or a full reference now opens its options straight away, rather than taking a second try.

References have their own menu too: open the source, or remove it. From any citation in your text you can still jump straight down to its full reference.

Removing a reference asks what you mean when the source is cited in your writing: take out just the reference, or the in-text citations along with it. A citation that covers several sources keeps the others. Either way, one undo brings everything back.

The toolbar, in two rows

The writing tools now sit in two rows: everything that shapes the text you have, then everything that puts something new in the page. The checks along the bottom are unchanged.

On a phone or tablet every button is bigger and better spaced, so the toolbar is comfortable under a thumb.

Updates land when you close the notice

When a new version of Alfred is ready, closing that notice now brings you the update rather than only hiding the message. If a manuscript is open, your writing is saved before the page refreshes.

A new institutional tier for whole departments and universities, with custom seats, billing, and support. Contact us for tailored pricing.

Some of you write in on behalf of a whole lab, a department, or an entire university, not just one desk. Campus is for you.

What Campus is

Campus is everything in Lab, scaled to your institution:

• Custom seat counts for your department or group, beyond Lab’s 5 seats.
• Centralized billing, purchase orders, and invoicing that fit how your institution buys.
• Onboarding and training for your team, so everyone gets to real work quickly.
• Priority support with a direct line to us.

How to get it

Campus is available worldwide, with pricing tailored to your needs. There is no self-serve checkout: write to us at [email protected] and we will shape a plan around your institution.

You will find Campus on the pricing page, just below Pro and Lab.