While every journal will have its own approach depending on the staff and individuals’ strengths, we want to help give you a rough idea of ways people get the work done. Having an understanding of how a few different types of journals approach these practical matters can help as you start your own workflows, recruit editors, reviewers, and production workers. Below are journals that work with NYU Libraries:
Vue: Voices in Urban Education is published by The Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools at Steinhardt. The Vue issue production manual (Google Doc) provides a detailed overview of the process and steps involved in publishing each issue.
Journal of Education and Emergencies (JEIE) is published by the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies and affiliated with NYU Steinhardt. The JEIE has a stand-alone website, although individual JEIE articles are published and stored in NYU’s institutional repository, the Faculty Digital Archive, to better facilitate preservation. NYU Libraries creates digital object identifiers (DOIs) for JEIE articles.
Much of your editorial workflow will revolve around a single issue. As you map out the future of your journal, you will also want to incorporate regular review of your practices, your editorial board, and your staff. Building in these checks can help take the pressure off making all the decisions at once and will help maintain the future success of your journal.
It’s a lot of work to complete all the tasks of publishing your journal. As you build out your first issues, consider how you want to distribute the work and how many people are needed to complete the tasks.
Talk to people who have been working on journals you admire– if you don’t know someone, ask us for suggestions. Asking people to mentor you through your journal process can help a lot. It’s worth following social media for organizations like the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) and the Association of University Presses, and SSP has a regular blog, Scholarly Kitchen.