URL forwarding is now available under Settings. This resolves the issue we had with isites URLs. Excellent !

We also have an isite web presence which unfortunately has pretty ugly URLs. Until isite also gets custom URLs it may be useful to have simple links from an openscholar site with a nice URL to the isite. That is possible by simply creating a page for each isite page. The page then contains the link. Unfortunately, there is no way to have redirection at these pages because that requires javascript or changes at the server level both of  which are not allowed, for good reasons. Since this approach is a workaround anyways, clicking one time is acceptable. Here is an example:

http://scholar.harvard.edu/plesch/cfm

I just learned that isites feature development is suspended while openscholar is improved. This means another migration in the future for us ...

It turns out that after all IT is able to provide vanity URLs for isite home pages and also for certain sub-pages. This is a much better solution. However, isites only provides this service for widely communicated pages. On the other hand, a concise URL is a prerequisite for reaching a wide audience, so it becomes a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Actually, the point of most of web content is to provide public and easily accessible information.