Institutional Journal Office — from, per journal per year

Overview

The university, society or research institute owns five, ten or twenty journals. Each is run by an academic in the gaps between teaching and research, each on its own terms, and none has professional support. The research office cannot tell the council how many articles were published last year, which journals are indexed, or which are at risk, because nobody collects that information. Hiring a publishing team is not in the budget; leaving things as they are is not in the plan.

Institutional Journal Office as a Service is the alternative to hiring. NeucitePress operates as your journal office: we bring every title onto one platform standard, adopt one policy set with permitted variations, provide central editorial-office and production support to each journal, maintain a dashboard showing the state of the whole portfolio, and produce an annual report written for your council. The institution owns the journals, the platform and the data; we run the office.

It is for universities, academies, research councils and learned societies with three or more journals and no dedicated publishing staff, and for those that have staff but need a professional standard across the portfolio.

What’s Included

• Multi-journal portfolio review — the starting point: every journal assessed on the Journal Health Check framework, with a portfolio-level view of strengths, risks and priorities, and a plan for bringing each title to standard.
• Shared policy set — one policy framework for peer review, ethics, licensing, open access, fees, archiving and corrections, adopted by every journal with documented variations where a discipline requires them.
• One platform standard — all journals on a current Open Journal Systems installation the institution controls, with identifiers, indexing plugins, archiving and backups configured the same way for every title.
• Central editorial-office support — submission handling, reviewer invitation and chasing, author correspondence and turnaround monitoring for each journal, so editors make decisions rather than send reminders.
• Central production — copyediting, typesetting, DOI registration, metadata deposit and publication on schedule for every accepted article.
• Consolidated dashboard — submissions, decisions, turnaround, output, indexing status, fees and waivers, and risks for every journal, updated monthly and available to the research office.
• Annual council report — the state of the portfolio, what was achieved, what is at risk and what is recommended, written for the people who fund it.

How It Works

1. Portfolio review: every journal assessed, the plan and the service level for each agreed with the institution.
2. Onboarding: journals migrated to the platform standard and the policy set, in a sequence set by the review.
3. Operation: editorial-office and production support run continuously; the dashboard is updated monthly; a quarterly review with the research office.
4. Annual report and renewal: the council report is delivered and the following year’s plan and service levels are agreed.

Priced annually per journal, with a portfolio discount that increases with the number of titles. The portfolio review is a separate first step and its fee is credited against the first year.

What Stays With Your Editors

Each journal’s editors keep final authority over reviewer selection, editorial assessment and acceptance. The office invites reviewers the editor chooses, chases the responses and prepares the information for decision; the decision is the editor’s. Board appointments and scope belong to each journal. NeucitePress runs the process and the infrastructure; the institution owns the journals and the editorial judgment stays with them.

Important Limitations

• Inclusion in any database is decided solely by that database. NeucitePress prepares, remediates and submits but cannot sell inclusion. The office makes journals eligible and manages applications; it does not guarantee results, citations or ranking.
• The service is scoped by submission and output volume per journal. Volumes well above the agreed level are re-scoped.
• Journals on commercial platforms with restrictive contracts may not be movable immediately; the portfolio review identifies these and proposes a route.
• We operate the office; we do not own it. Everything is built so the institution can take it in-house later, and we will help you do so if you decide to.

Common Questions

How is this different from setting up our own journal office?
Setup builds a unit for your staff to run. This service runs it for you, indefinitely or until you are ready to take it over. Many institutions start here and move to their own unit once they have seen how it works.

Can journals opt out of the shared policies?
Variations are allowed where a discipline needs them and are documented. The point of a shared set is that the council can say every journal meets one standard.

What does the council report contain?
Output, turnaround, indexing status, finances, risks and recommendations for each journal and the portfolio, written in plain language for people who do not work in publishing.

Request a proposal, or begin with the Journal Health Check.