So you want to start your own open access academic journal?

Key steps you need to consider when launching your own journal

This guide takes you through the key steps to consider when launching a journal. If you are interested in starting your own journal, we would be more than happy to talk to you about it. Our team have the expertise and knowledge to guide you through the process, and our systems mean that you won’t have to deal with the IT or infrastructure issues — you can just focus on building the editorial team and build the best journal to help your community.

Key Steps

Aims and Scope

Your aims and scope are key for your journal. They should reflect why you started the journal, what articles you are hoping to publish and what subjects your journal will and won’t cover. Getting the aims and scope right will help your audience find and submit to your journal and ensure focus for a successful journal.

Editors and Editorial Board

Your editors and editorial board are also crucial. In the early days of your project, this team will be the main cheerleaders for your journal, and their expertise will help grow and shape the journal in its years to come. Finding a mix of people that includes some big names in the field, as well as up and coming researchers keen to get involved, is often the best way to build a board. This will mean that you will have endorsements from people that hold weight in the community, but might not have that much time to put into the journal, and the enthusiasm of the younger researchers who can put the time into reviewing and commissioning for the journal.

Submissions

Soliciting submissions can’t start soon enough! Don’t underestimate how long it can take from when a fellow researcher promises to submit a paper, to when it is actually written, submitted and successfully through peer review. Using your editorial board to generate interest and submissions can be vital. This can help ensure that your first few articles really help encapsulate what the journal aims to cover. A new journal lacks reputation and recognition in the community, meaning the first papers will need active commissioning from the editorial team.

Open Access Model

When deciding on the model for your open access journal, you will need to think about both how it is funded and what licenses you want to make available to your authors. Our post on licenses explains some of the options available and how compatible they are with funder mandates.

This is also a good time to look at how your journal will be funded. Will it be a platinum/diamond open access journal, with no fees for readers or authors and, if so, how will you fund it? Will it be an open access journal that charges article processing charges (APCs) in order to sustain itself? If this is the case you will need to establish what level of APC your authors could support, and what level would cover the costs of running the journal. Setting up a waiver policy to ensure that the APC is not a barrier to publication is important here and will make sure the journal is accessible to all researchers.

Peer Review

Peer review is an important aspect of your journal, and the type and guidelines need to be clear to your authors, editors and reviewers. Establishing what works best for your community and researchers and building up practices that are both ethical and efficient is important. Would your journal function best with open or closed review? Should it be blinded? If so, should it be single or double-blind? An end-to-end peer review system can be the most efficient way to keep track of papers, authors, reviewers and reviews.

Editorial Policies and Publishing Ethics

As well as establishing the procedures on how you would like the journal to function, it is also important to think about how to deal with it when things go wrong. Having a plan for when issues arise is important. Even if you are not a member of COPE you can follow their ethical guidelines if a problem comes up. Instituting regular plagiarism checks is also helpful, CrossRef similarity check is one service that can assist in this.

Other editorial policies should also be established at this point. What will your journal’s policy on data sharing be? Will you be advising or requiring authors to make their data available? Are there any specific repositories that you would advise authors to use? How will you direct your authors regarding funding sources and declarations of interest? Does your subject area cover animal or human experiments, and if so what will your journal’s policy on ethical approval be?

Many traditional journals have best practices established for these issues, and it is worth looking through journals in similar areas to see how they deal with them. By establishing a baseline you can decide whether your journal will follow similar policies to other journals, or if you want to encourage a change in the culture of your field (e.g. trying to increase the amount of data that is published). Having clear policies set up before you start publishing will help guide you when issues come up.

Platform

When choosing your publication platform, assessing its discoverability and usability is key for your research to reach the widest audience possible. Has your platform been fully optimised for search engine optimisation (SEO) to allow people searching to find your publication? Will the article pages have the relevant metadata to make sure they can be found by readers searching for them?

The formats in which you can publish also affect the discoverability of your research. If only PDF publication is available, this can reduce the discoverability of papers published. Publishing using XML makes your research more discoverable and also makes it future-proof. Integration with (or automated feeds to) repositories, indexing and abstracting services and other third-party systems will make a huge difference to making your journal discoverable in the easiest possible way. Automatic deposit to services like CrossRef, DOAJ and institutional repositories can greatly aid the ability of researchers to find your articles.

Production

Knowing what formats of your articles will inform the setup of your production workflows. For the best, most accessible and preservable research, publishing using XML is a must. Our post here outlines some of the benefits of using XML. The speed and efficiency of production workflows is also something to look at, as they are often inefficient. If there is a high amount of automation, this can reduce errors and costs, and reduce the time it takes to produce the finished article.

Creating a usable and readable PDF template is important, as many readers still prefer this format for downloading, printing and reading articles. Making it easily readable will help published research reach more people. Print is also something to look at here, many researchers or society members still enjoy reading and collecting the print editions of journals. If there is an option for print on demand or to provide print copies to your society members, this can be an added benefit to your readers.

Your production workflow will depend on what formats you decide to use, and how much funding your journal has. No matter what formats you have, it is important to ensure that basic metadata is available at the very least. Our post here has more information on why metadata is important, and what features are vital to include.

Third-Party Services

To ensure your articles are citable, and have persistent links, digital object identifiers (DOIs) are essential. Some more information on DOIs can be found in our post here. DOIs are registered through CrossRef. CrossMark is a useful service that allows readers to know that the article they are reading is the most up-to-date version. This can be embedded on webpages and in PDFs. It is driven by CrossRef and is well worth investigating to ensure that readers and librarians are always confident of accessing the correct version of your articles. Our blog post explains the various services CrossRef offers.

ISSNs are used to uniquely identify publications. They are important to distinguish your journal, as well as being requirement for many abstracting and indexing services. ISSNs can be applied for through ISSN.org — generally only once five articles have been published in the journal.

These services are both useful for the discoverability and content citation. They are not the same as preservation of the content. Preservation of the scholarly record is very important as part of your responsibilities to your authors and readers, but is something that many people overlook when starting a new journal. There are several preservation services that can be used to ensure that your articles are accessible, no matter what happens to your journal. Portico and CLOCKSS are the two most common services used to preserve the scholarly record.

Abstracting and Indexing

Having DOIs, an ISSN and a preservation service is a requirement for most abstracting and indexing services, which are hugely important to making your journal visible, discoverable and accessible. Whilst publishing an open access article makes it legally accessible to all, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be found and read. Abstracting and Indexing services are vital for reaching the right audience, especially for ensuring that your article is found in routine library searches.

DOAJ is the most common route for open access journals to be searchable in library catalogues. It can be applied for after five articles have been published. Google Scholar is also a hugely popular resource that will direct a lot of traffic to your journal. For this, again five articles must be published before applications are considered. Google Scholar also has various requirements around your publishing platform architecture to allow your journal to be indexed. The time it takes to be listed in these services varies, but it usually takes at least several months after application.

Scopus and Web of Science (for an impact factor) both take a lot longer to assess and list journals. Scopus requires two years of publication before a journal will be considered, however Web of Science now provides the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) which considers new journals. You can apply soon after launch, however time for assessment is still lengthy. Listing in the ESCI does not give you an Impact Factor, but it is the route to be moved into the Web of Science to receive an Impact Factor.

Reaching your audience

Once your journal is launched, you will want to make sure that people actually read, use and cite the research you publish. One of the most common ways for people to keep up-to-date is through an email table of content alert. These can be set up through MailChimp or similar services. It’s also useful to look at other tools to reach your audience. Where do online discussions about research in your discipline take place? Are they on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook? If so, set up a journal account and join in the discussion. Make your journal as easy to find as possible. For more information on how to market your journal, see our blog post.

Veruscript Publishing Services for Partner Journal

Veruscript Publishing Services is designed to help smaller societies and individuals set up and run their own open access journals. The service uses low cost article processing charges (APCs) to allow the creation of accessible open access journals. Our service enables societies and individuals to own and control their journals, whilst we takes care of the technical side and systems that support the journal. As there are no setup or running costs and APCs are only incurred for articles published, this is a risk-free path to launching an open access journal.

Veruscript Publishing Services provides the systems and services required for end-to-end journal publishing. This includes:

• articles submission site
• publishing platform
• production services.

Veruscript’s platform has designed to optimise SEO and provides globally visibility of research published. It gives our partner journals the following benefits:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an infrastructure provider. AWS is a secure cloud services platform, offering computing power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow while maintaining highest standards in security and availability of the content
• An SSL certificate issued by DigiCert Inc., a trusted third party certificate authority
• Daily and monthly database backups
• Automated publication tools
• Veruscript support for the content delivery site

As part of our integrated publication system, your content will be automatically deposited to third party services including CrossRef and Portico. All post production checks and publication management are done via an easy-to-use online control panel.

Veruscript aims to be a helpful and conscientious partner to all our users of our publishing services. We are happy to advise on the development and progression of a journal, and are committed to providing high-quality service at low cost. We have a number of options available to suit any budget and publishing experience. Our top-tier Gold service has a base price of just GBP300 per article and covers articles up to 12 typeset pages. Our Silver and Bronze packages are lower cost and allow you to take a modular approach regarding what you need. Our Gold service includes:

As always, if you have any questions about starting a journal, or journals publishing in general, please don’t hesitate to contact us at partnerships@veruscript.com — we look forward to hearing from you.