Growing a New Academic Journal: Strategies for Editors-in-Chief

Becoming an editor of a journal is an exciting, albeit potentially daunting, task, particularly for a new journal where the goal is to establish a presence and foster growth. The Editor-in-Chief (EiC) plays a crucial role in shaping the journal's direction, ensuring its quality, and increasing its visibility within the scholarly community. Based on the provided materials, here are key areas the EiC should focus on:

1. Establish a Strong Foundation and Management Infrastructure

Initial Assessment: After getting familiar with the journal's mechanics, such as the submission system and timelines, it's recommended to assess current practices.
Well-Managed Infrastructure: A successful journal requires a well-managed infrastructure. This includes appropriate training for editors, reviewers, and staff.
Define Policies and Procedures: Establish clear policies to address various issues arising in the editorial process. This includes processes for handling submissions, managing ethical concerns and potential misconduct, conflicts of interest, and handling complaints and appeals. Written procedures are essential.
Transparency: Ensure transparency in journal operations and policies, including the peer-review process, copyright terms, licensing information, and advertising policies. The principles of transparency and best practice are crucial.
Journal Content Standards: As the editor, you are responsible for everything published. Take reasonable steps to ensure the quality of material, basing decisions on importance, originality, clarity, and relevance to the journal's remit. Maintain high professional standards for the journal website.

2. Build and Engage the Editorial Board

Recruit a Solid Editorial Board: Building a solid Editorial Board is fundamental. Board members should meet specific scholarly criteria and be approved by the EiC.
Define Roles and Responsibilities: Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of all editors and Editorial Board Members (EBMs). This includes tasks like reviewing manuscripts, providing feedback on policies, promoting the journal, attending meetings, and editing special issues.
Manage Conflicts of Interest: Ask potential EBMs to provide a list of potential conflicts of interest (CoIs). Be mindful of potential CoIs arising from multiple editorial board positions, especially concerning decision-making authority.
Maximize Potential: Maximize the full potential of the journal’s EiC and EBMs. Encourage them to contribute by organizing special issues, recommending hot topics, submitting feature papers, and promoting the journal at conferences.
Utilize Network: Ask for the EiC and EBMs’ help to invite high-quality feature papers and recommend other EBMs, Guest Editors (GEs), and authors. EBMs can also help recruit prominent scholars and attract suitable expert authors. Scholars may trust a journal more when distinguished experts are on the Editorial Board.
Maintain Relationships: Cultivate a group of high-quality EBMs, GEs, reviewers, and authors, and maintain a good relationship with them.

3. Implement Effective Editorial and Peer Review Processes

Adopt Appropriate Peer Review: Adopt a peer-review process appropriate for your journal/field and resources. All peer review processes must be transparently described and well managed.
Train Reviewers: Provide training for reviewers.
Ethical Aspects in Review: Ask reviewers to address ethical aspects of the submission, such as potential previous publication, plagiarism, ethical approval, data integrity, and declared competing interests.
Handle Submissions from Editors/Board Members: If editors or board members publish in the journal, have a procedure to ensure the peer review is handled independently of the author/editor to avoid impropriety.
Address Misconduct: Have mechanisms for receiving and responding to allegations of research, publication, and review misconduct. Define types of misconduct and outline policies and procedures for handling such issues. This includes addressing potential plagiarism, data fabrication, duplicate publication, and conflicts of interest in review. Handling serious cases appropriately is essential.
Promote Data Sharing and Reporting Guidelines: Encourage the use of reporting guidelines, registration of studies (like clinical trials), and policies on data availability to enhance transparency and reproducibility.

4. Develop a Content and Special Issue Strategy

Focus on Quality and Scope: Ensure published content is high quality and relevant to the journal's aims and standards. Maintain the study's relevance to the remit of the journal.
Special Issue Strategy: A good Special Issue (SI) can significantly benefit the journal. Develop a strategy for successful SIs.
Good Topics and GEs: Successful SIs are based on hot topics with a decent scope and active GEs with good backgrounds (e.g., from the EiC/EBMs). Encourage GEs to send out invitations.
Cooperation with EBMs: Encourage EBMs to set up or contribute to Special Issues. This can lead to increased publications.

5. Enhance Marketing and Visibility

Focus on Core Activities: For smaller journals, focus on core marketing activities.
Regular Promotion: Conduct regular promotion using issue covers, newsletters, and awards. Travel Grants and Best Paper Awards are suggested activities.
Conference Presence: Attend conferences recommended by EiCs/EBMs. Leading a booth is vital for SCIE journals, while sponsoring paid conferences and seeking joint booth opportunities is recommended for ESCI/Scopus journals. These opportunities enhance communication with editors, authors, and reviewers.
Utilize Editorial Board: Leverage EBMs to promote the journal among their peers or at conferences.
Consistent Output: For new journals, consistent output with high quality is important.

6. Pursue Indexing

Goal Setting: Let the EiC and EBMs know the goal of getting indexed by major databases.
Indexing Criteria: Understand the criteria used by indexing bodies like Web of Science (SCIE, SSCI, ESCI) and Scopus. These include quality criteria (e.g., scholarly content, clear policies, peer review) and impact criteria (e.g., citation analysis, content significance).
Attract High-Quality Papers: Indexing success relies on attracting papers of good quality, hot papers, and papers from distinguished researchers. Ask for the EiC and EBMs’ help in this effort.
Monitor Performance: Citation activity and journal performance are monitored for continued coverage in indexing databases.

7. Navigate Competition

Understand the Market: Know the journal market, including the landscape of external competitors. There may be opportunities in specific categories, such as a high demand for Open Access journals in certain fields.
Focus on a Niche: To avoid fierce competition from larger journals, consider focusing on one specific area.
Leverage Relationships: Maximize the potential of your editorial team, authors, and reviewers, and cultivate strong relationships with them. This can be a key strategy against competition.

By focusing on these areas, an Editor-in-Chief can lay a strong foundation, build a dedicated team, ensure ethical and quality standards, strategically manage content, and effectively promote the journal, ultimately leading to growth and increased visibility in the scholarly community.