Revive & Modernize Your Journal — from

Overview

The journal was good once. Now issues are eighteen months late, the website looks like it was built by a graduate student in 2009 (because it was), half the board has not responded to an email in years, and the last time anyone looked at the peer review policy was before plagiarism software existed. Closing it would waste a title with real history; continuing as is will finish it slowly.

Revive & Modernize Your Journal is a six-month program that resets everything except the title and its record. It starts with a Journal Health Check to establish exactly where things stand, then runs platform, backlog, policy, board and integrity work in parallel against a single turnaround plan. At the end you have a journal that is publishing on schedule, on a platform you control, with policies and a board that would pass an indexing evaluator’s first look.

It is for editors who have inherited a struggling journal, institutions that want to save a title rather than launch a new one, and societies whose journal has drifted while nobody was watching.

What’s Included

• Journal Health Check — the full audit across editorial workload, peer review, integrity, platform, production, discoverability, indexing eligibility, funding and governance, producing the baseline and the turnaround plan.
• Platform upgrade or migration — the journal moved to a current Open Journal Systems installation (or the existing OJS upgraded), with the archive migrated, DOIs preserved, identifiers and indexing plugins configured, and a clean, mobile-ready site.
• Backlog clearance — accepted manuscripts in the queue copyedited, typeset and published; manuscripts stuck in review triaged with the editor and moved to decision.
• Policy rewrite — peer review, ethics, authorship, licensing, open access, corrections and retractions, and archiving policies rewritten to current standards and published.
• Editorial board reset — inactive members retired with courtesy, role and term defined, and a targeted search for new members from the regions and subfields the journal lacks.
• Integrity-screening baseline — similarity, image and reference screening introduced at submission, with a procedure for handling what it finds.
• Six-month turnaround plan — milestones, owners and a fortnightly check-in with the editor, and a closing report with the state of the journal and what comes next.

How It Works

1. Month one: Journal Health Check and turnaround plan agreed with the editor and owner.
2. Months two to three: platform migration, policy rewrite and backlog production run in parallel; board search launched.
3. Months four to five: backlog cleared and a regular publication schedule established; new board members appointed by the journal; integrity screening live.
4. Month six: closing review, indexing pathway confirmed, handover to steady-state operation (your team or one of our ongoing services).

Priced as a single package for one journal, scoped by backlog size and archive volume. Ongoing services after month six are optional and separate.

What Stays With Your Editors

Throughout the program, your editors keep final authority over reviewer selection, editorial assessment and acceptance. Backlog triage means we prepare the information and chase reviewers; the decisions are the editor’s. Board appointments are made by the journal. NeucitePress runs the process, the production and the infrastructure.

Important Limitations

• Inclusion in any database is decided solely by that database. NeucitePress prepares, remediates and submits but cannot sell inclusion. The program makes the journal eligible to apply; it does not guarantee a result.
• We do not promise citations, ranking or a particular number of submissions.
• Backlog clearance covers manuscripts already accepted or in review. It does not include reviewing manuscripts ourselves or publishing work the editor has not accepted.
• Migration from a commercial platform depends on that platform’s export and the journal’s contract; we confirm feasibility in month one.

Common Questions

Why not just launch a new journal?
A revived journal keeps its ISSN, its archive, its DOIs and its publication history, all of which matter to indexing evaluators and to authors. A new title starts from zero.

What if the Health Check finds the journal cannot be saved?
Then we say so at month one, with reasons, and the remaining program is not charged. It is rare, but it happens when the title has integrity problems that cannot be remediated.

What happens after six months?
The journal is handed back in working order with a plan. Many clients keep us for production, integrity screening or the indexing application, but there is no obligation.

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