Journal Publishing Guide

Every journal starts at a different place. Below are some steps you'll take to launch a new journal.

The University of Victoria accepts proposals for new journals throughout the year. Before submitting a proposal, we expect you to:

• Review the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for UVic affiliated journals or non-affiliated journals.
• Review the New journal checklist to help you complete your new journal proposal.
• Email us to set up a meeting to discuss your proposal. We are always ready to discuss any questions you may have.
• Email us the completed proposal.

Once your journal proposal has been approved, we will ask you to sign an MOU and set up your online journal website soon after.

Student-led journal

If you are a student-led team, consider joining or reviving a journal that already exists.

Starting a new journal can take time and effort. You’ll need to work at attracting submissions, finding reviewers, and recruiting volunteer editors. Publishing your journal regularly boosts visibility and attracts more readers. Database vendors prefer to boost journals that have a proven record of sustainability.

Before you start your proposal, find a faculty sponsor for your publication. This sponsor will guide you, ensure your work meets academic standards, and help you use institutional resources. They should actively support the journal for at least one academic year.

Support could include joining meetings, giving feedback, and helping your team. This is important for the credibility and sustainability of your journal. Start looking for a sponsor early to have enough time for collaboration.

If you have trouble finding one, please email our team for assistance.

The new journal checklist is based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing will help you complete the new journal proposal.

• Journal title: Ensure the name and acronym are unique and not easily confused with other journals.Search journal directories like the ISSN portal, Ulrichs Periodicals Directory, and Google before you make your choice.
• Publication frequency: Decide how often you'll publish (e.g., 1, 2, or 4 times a year) or consider a rolling publication schedule. Aim to publish at least 5 research articles per year.
• Scope and Focus: Define the niche, topics, and types of submissions (e.g., research articles, reviews, etc.), and target audience.
• About the journal: Includes details about ownership, management, editorial board, and team members. It’s best practice to list the full names and affiliations of anyone involved in the journal.
• Submission guidelines: Provide clear instructions for authors on submission requirements and formats.
• Section policies: Set content guidelines (e.g., for articles, editorials and reviews) including scope and length. 
• Peer-review policy: Describe the peer-review process (e.g., single anonymous, double-blind) and procedures.
• Policies and ethics: Develop ethical guidelines and set up procedures for addressing concerns when they arise.
• Author rights and licensing: Define author rights by choosing a Creative Commons license for your journal.
• Sustainability: Outline the monetary and time costs associated with the journal. In addition, explain how you will manage changes to the editorial board and handle staff turnover.

One of the first steps after launching your journal website is assembling your editorial team. How your team is structured will depend on several factors such as:

• Types of submissions: original research articles, opinion pieces, book/article reviews, etc.
• Skills required: social media management, copy editing, project management, etc.
• Reporting structure: who’s in charge of what, and how team members share updates or decisions.

Editorial Board

The editorial board oversees the content, policies, and the success of a journal. To keep your journal running smoothly, define team roles clearly, have an onboarding strategy, and plan ahead for leadership changes. 

• Editorial Boards (McGill Library): this guide offers an overview of editorial boards. It covers what each member is responsible for, how much work they’re expected to do, and how the team handles recruitment and succession planning. 
• Becoming an Editor (PKP School): this free, self-paced course is offered via PKP (the creators of OJS) and covers the fundamentals of journal editing. One module focuses particularly on editorial roles and responsibilities.
• Editorial Boards (Springer): provides an overview of editorial boards, their objectives, common staff roles, recruiting, and board meetings.

Editorial Team

You will add your editorial team as users and assign them the appropriate role on the website. Also consider a term length and how you plan on recruiting for the position. Here is a list of roles:

• Journal managers & editors have access to all the editorial workflows and most of the settings, including assigning articles to editors.
• Layout editors & copyeditors can only see certain stages of the process for articles to which they’ve been assigned
• Guest editors & section editors can see all stages of the process, but only for articles to which they've been assigned
• Reviewers can only see the review stage of articles to which they’ve been assigned; reviewers can also decline assignments
• Authors can only see their own papers at certain stages, depending on the settings configured for the anonymity of the review

Users can have multiple roles. To assign someone to a particular task (e.g. review) they’ll need to be assigned that role in the system. These roles are predetermined in the online journal platform.

These resources will give you a good overall idea of most of the major decisions points and tasks when starting up a new journal. We recommend reviewing at least one of them before starting your proposal.

• Hybrid Publishing Lab’s Starter's Guide visually outlines the steps to start an open-access journal. They also provide a helpful PDF worksheet with questions and prompts to guide you.
• The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) offers a free 14-module video-based course called “Becoming an Editor.” It covers the main tasks of a scholarly journal editor and provides solutions to common problems. This course is also useful for new editors of existing journals.
• The Open Access Journal Starter kit will walk you through all the steps of starting a new journal. It provides easy to read background information on open access publishing more generally.