How to Start an Open Access Journal: Editorial and Technical Steps
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7 Jul 2021··9 min read
How to Start an Open Access Journal
This blog covers all the essentials of starting an open access (OA) journal from finding a niche, to setting up an editorial board, to creating a workflow, and finally, publishing.
It’s 1996. HTML and HTTP have recently been invented. Internet is just starting to pick up pace. People are still not so comfortable reading off their computers. Imagine starting a web-only open access journal in this environment.
Sounds tough? David J Solomon did just that with his journal, Medical Education Online — a peer-reviewed, open access, electronic journal in health professional education.
“I was intrigued with the idea of electronic journals and the concept of making scholarship freely available. In 1995 starting a new online journal just seemed like an interesting experiment…I asked several colleagues around the country to write articles for an initial issue to get the journal off the ground. While about eight agreed, only three actually completed their articles. Along with an editorial of my own, we launched the journal in April 1996 with these three articles.” writes Solomon.
Launching an open access (OA) journal back then was definitely difficult, but it is only just a little less so today.
This guide covers the essentials of starting an open access journal — from finding a niche and setting up an editorial board to creating a publishing workflow, meeting technical requirements, and attracting authors and reviewers.
Do The Groundwork
Find a niche
Starting an open access journal in an area already crowded with established titles does not make much sense, academically or as a publishing venture. Instead, look for a subject that is underserved by existing journals, an emerging research area, or a community whose publishing needs are not being met.
Essentially, find a gap and fill it.
Start by researching existing journals in your field. Look at their scope, article types, publication frequency, peer-review model, fees, editorial boards, and indexing. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), for example, currently lists more than 23,000 open access journals and over 13 million article records, spanning 92 languages and 141 countries!
That makes it a useful place to understand how crowded your proposed subject area already is.
Define your content strategy
Once you have defined the niche for your journal, move on to your content strategy.
What kind of content will you publish? Will you accept only original research articles, or will you also include systematic reviews, book reviews, editorials, case reports, methods papers, interviews, or conference proceedings?
Define the journal's scope as clearly as possible. Your author guidelines should make it obvious what kinds of manuscripts you want, what research areas fall within the journal's remit, and what you will not publish.
A clear scope also makes it easier for editors to decide whether a submission belongs in the journal in the first place.
Create an editorial board
Recruiting members for your open access journal's editorial board should be one of your first priorities. Look for researchers who are respected in the field and whose expertise matches the journal's scope.
A strong editorial board can help establish credibility, shape the journal's policies, attract submissions, and connect you with potential reviewers and authors.
Some tips to help you get started:
Reach out directly to established scholars in your field. Create a dream editorial and advisory board and then approach the people who make the cut. Karina Quinn, who started the open access (OA) journal Writing from Below, writes about building her advisory committee: “If there’s an academic in your field whose work you admire, approach them. I think we were only turned down by three or four people–everyone else came back immediately with an “Of course! I’d be honored”.
Start with a small group. Early board members can recommend other researchers who may be a good fit.
Use your academic network. Reach out to your institution's faculty, ask colleagues for recommendations, and explain the problem or gap your journal is trying to address.
Ideally, if you've done a good job identifying a genuine gap, it will be easier to explain the journal's purpose and get researchers interested in joining.
Decide how often you will publish
Define your journal's publication frequency before you begin accepting manuscripts.
In the beginning, when it is more difficult to get good quality submissions, a quarterly or biannual schedule may be more manageable than trying to publish monthly. As the journal develops, you can revisit its publication frequency.
Plan your funding
Starting and running a journal can be expensive, even when the articles themselves are freely available to readers.
Decide whether costs will be covered by the institution, grants, memberships or article charges, and show every author fee and waiver rule on the journal website. The DOAJ application guide lists the policies an open access journal should make visible.
Many open access journals work with a dedicated team of volunteers and cost-effective workflows to minimize expenses. Article processing fees, membership fees, donations, partnerships, institutional funding, sponsorships, and advertising are different ways to raise funds and revenues that help you grow your journal.
Take care of the technical requirements
Your journal will need persistent identification and reliable publishing infrastructure.
Apply for an ISSN through the appropriate ISSN centre for your journal. The route, required evidence, fees and processing time depend on the responsible centre; plan for this before seeking indexing.
Consider registering DOIs for published articles through a DOI registration agency. Keep in mind that a DOI is an identifier, not a quality certification. Having a DOI does not by itself mean that a journal or article has been peer reviewed, is indexed, or meets a particular quality standard.
Do your research
Don't dive headfirst - as tempting as it is!
There are a lot of resources available to help you launch an open access journal, so explore them extensively before you start publishing. Approach your institution's library, talk to other publishers and journal editors, read publishing and indexing guidelines, and research the requirements of the databases and services you eventually want to apply to.
Your decisions about editorial policies, licensing, peer review, metadata, preservation, and publishing infrastructure are much easier to make when you understand the requirements beforehand.
In this respect, the fact that you're reading this article shows that you're on the right track!
Administrative Setup
Set up a team
You'll need people to sustain your journal operations.
Think about the roles you will need to fill. A small new open access journal may begin with a chief editor and a largely volunteer editorial team, but the work can quickly expand as submissions increase.
Depending on your publishing model, responsibilities may include:
Editor-in-chief
Associate or section editors
Editorial assistants
Peer reviewers
Copy editors and proofreaders
Typesetters
Web or publishing support
Marketing and communications
You don't necessarily need a large team from day one. What matters is that every essential responsibility has a clear owner.
Create a workflow
Without an efficient workflow, your journal can become a victim of interminable delays and errors.
Define your publishing workflow right at the start. It should detail who on your team will do what, when, and how.
Here's a list of things that need to be pre-defined:
Protocols (style guides, standards, policies, templates, etc.): The style guide you use will depend on your journal’s area of interest. ACS, APA, Chicago, and MLA are some of the commonly used ones.
Overall timeline: Set your publication frequency, submission windows, editorial deadlines, and issue schedule. A quarterly or biannual schedule can be easier to manage for a new journal than a more frequent one.
Peer review process and timeline: You need to set a timeline for reviewers and when they should send in their feedback for the papers by. We will talk more about peer review in the next section.
Editorial process and timeline: Once a manuscript is accepted, it may go through copy-editing, proofreading, typesetting, metadata creation, and other production steps. Build these stages into your schedule instead of treating publication as the moment a peer-review decision is made.
Publishing and distribution process: Decide how articles will be published and preserved. For a web-only journal, you may publish articles in HTML as well as PDF. Structured formats such as JATS XML can also help publishers exchange article metadata and content with other systems.
Many open access publishers vouch for Open Journal Systems (OJS) — a free, open source journal management and publishing system developed by the Public Knowledge Project. It is a great way to streamline your workflow.
Quality Standards & Peer Review
Peer review is what defines quality standards. But peer review alone does not guarantee quality. Your editorial policies should also address research methodology, publication ethics, conflicts of interest, authorship, corrections, retractions, and other issues relevant to your field.
There is no single peer-review model that every journal must use. You might choose single-blind, double-blind, or open peer review depending on your discipline and publishing goals.
Rather than simply copying another journal's model, explain your process clearly to authors and reviewers.
The peer-review process is also infamous for causing delays. Set realistic reviewer deadlines and include a buffer for late reviews. If reviewers repeatedly miss deadlines, have a process for finding replacements without leaving manuscripts in limbo.
Building a reviewer network is not easy, especially for a new journal. Reaching out directly to researchers, inviting interested reviewers to register through your website, asking existing editorial board members for referrals, and identifying researchers who publish regularly in your subject area can all help.
Your editorial team should also keep track of reviewer performance and conflicts of interest. A large reviewer database is useful, but a smaller network of appropriate and responsive reviewers can be more valuable than a long list of names.
Design and Marketing
Most publishers starting a new open access journal tend to leave design and marketing on the backburner - don't!
The journal's website, article pages, author guidelines, and submission experience are all part of how potential authors and readers encounter your publication. They should be addressed from day one.
The different design aspects include:
The typeset format and style guidelines
Journal design and article layout
Website design
Author and reviewer-facing pages
Marketing and communications materials
You can hire someone full time or outsource the designing. The more professional your journal looks, the better the impression it creates.
Your marketing will depend on who your target audience is, but the bare essentials include:
A website: Your journal needs a clear home online with information about its scope, editorial board, policies, submission process, published articles, and contact details.
Indexing and discoverability: Once your journal meets the relevant requirements, apply to appropriate directories and scholarly discovery services. DOAJ is one important directory for open access journals, but indexing requirements vary considerably between services.
Good article metadata: Provide accurate titles, author information, abstracts, identifiers, references, licensing information, and other relevant metadata. Crossref notes that clean and complete metadata supports citation matching and discovery, while richer metadata can make scholarly content more useful to downstream systems.
Structured article content: Where appropriate, provide machine-readable formats such as JATS XML alongside human-readable article formats. This can make your content easier for publishing and discovery systems to process.
Direct marketing: In the beginning, you will need to actively attract submissions and readers. Depending on your field, this might include direct email, academic mailing lists, conference announcements, society newsletters, social media, and outreach through your editorial board's networks.
Researchers can use SciSpace search to explore related literature while developing a journal’s editorial scope; check primary papers and the journal’s own policies before making publication decisions.
Before you go
Starting an open access journal is a long-term publishing project, not simply a website launch.
Before publishing your first issue, make sure you have a clear scope, an editorial team, documented policies, a workable peer-review process, a realistic publication schedule, a sustainable funding model, and a plan for discoverability and preservation.
Get those foundations right first. The technology can then support the journal rather than becoming another problem for your editorial team to manage.
