Set Up Your University’s Own Journal Office — from

Overview

Journals grow up inside universities without anyone deciding they should. One lives on a departmental website, one on a commercial platform the founder pays for, one in a professor’s email. Policies differ, quality varies, and when an editor retires the journal goes with them. Now the institution wants to treat its journals as a service it provides, with standards, a budget and someone accountable.

Institutional Journal Publishing Unit Setup builds that service. We work with the library, research office or press to design a governance structure, install and configure an Open Journal Systems platform on infrastructure you control, write a common policy set that every journal adopts, define the staffing model, and plan the migration of existing titles and the launch of the unit. The unit is built to be owned and run by the institution; our role ends at handover, unless you choose to keep us for operations.

It is for university libraries, research offices, new university presses and national research bodies that need to bring several journals under one roof.

What’s Included

• Governance design — a publishing board or committee, its terms of reference, the relationship between the unit and each journal’s editorial board, and the editorial independence policy.
• Platform — Open Journal Systems installed on your servers or your chosen hosting, configured for multiple journals, with identifiers (DOI, ORCID, ISSN), indexing plugins, archiving and backups set up and documented.
• Common policy set — peer review, ethics and integrity, authorship, licensing, open access, fees and waivers, archiving, corrections and retractions, written once and adopted by each journal with permitted variations.
• Staffing model — the roles the unit needs (managing editor, production, platform administration), job descriptions, and a realistic budget for year one and steady state.
• Standard operating procedures — from submission to publication, written for the people who will do the work.
• Migration and launch plan — which journals move first, how content and identifiers are transferred, and the sequence for bringing the unit live.
• Training and handover — training for unit staff and journal editors, and a handover pack that lets the institution run the unit without us.

How It Works

1. Discovery: we inventory the institution’s journals, interview editors and the sponsor, and agree the unit’s scope.
2. Design: governance, policy set, staffing model and platform architecture, approved by the sponsor.
3. Build: platform installation and configuration, policy drafting, procedure writing.
4. Migration and launch: the first journals move onto the platform, staff are trained, the unit goes live.
5. Handover: documentation, credentials and a final review; optional operations support afterward.

Priced as a fixed setup project, scoped by the number of journals in the initial migration. Typical duration is four to eight months.

What Stays With Your Editors

The unit provides infrastructure and standards; it does not run the journals’ editorial process. Each journal’s editors keep full authority over reviewer selection, editorial assessment and acceptance, and the governance we design writes that independence into the unit’s terms of reference. NeucitePress builds the unit and, if retained, runs the infrastructure; the editorial judgment stays with each journal.

Important Limitations

• The unit is designed to be owned by the institution. That requires the institution to fund and staff it; we can design a lean model but cannot make it free.
• Where journals in the unit later apply for indexing, inclusion is decided solely by each database. NeucitePress prepares, remediates and submits but cannot sell inclusion.
• Migrating a journal from a commercial platform depends on that platform’s export capabilities and the journal’s contract. We assess this in discovery and flag any journal that cannot be moved cleanly.
• A publishing unit improves consistency, continuity and credibility. It does not by itself bring citations or rankings.

Common Questions

Can existing editors keep their journals?
Yes. The unit provides a platform, policies and support; editorial boards remain in charge of their journals. Most editors are relieved to hand over the operational work.

Why OJS and not a commercial platform?
OJS is open source, widely used by institutional publishers, supported by a large community, and can be hosted on your own infrastructure so the institution owns its platform and data. Where a different platform is genuinely better for you, we will say so.

What if we do not have staff yet?
We can operate the unit for a defined period while you recruit, then hand over. See the Institutional Journal Office package for the ongoing option.

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