Today’s generations will never have to know the uncertainty of having a question and not having the answer at their fingertips, literally. Thanks to the Digital Era, “googling” an answer is a verb, asking Alexa for the information you need is a household option, and having the latest research publications available openly in public forums is an accepted and expected occurrence.

Still, while it’s easy to publish work through electronic forums, finding articles that are legitimate and based on peer-review is another step. In order for you to ensure that you are using or publishing through a journal that is credible, there must be specific management techniques that are engaged.

Judging Relevance and Quality With Peer Reviews

Peer review has traditionally been, and is still considered to be, one of the best ways to judge the relevance and quality of an academic journal. Historically, early journals didn’t use peer reviews, but once the tradition was implemented, it caught on quickly as a way to ensure the legitimacy of an article in most reputable scholarly and scientific journals and is still used today.

However, there is debate about the peer review process and how it’s used with electronic peer review. Artificial intelligence is stepping in over the actual human review itself, and these automated systems have a lot of quantitative data but not as much qualitative, which is where relevance and quality are judged. But the cost-saving and time-efficient measures make this type of peer review popular, and opens the door to allowing independent peer-reviewed journals.

Benefits and Challenges to Publishing Your Own Peer-Reviewed Journal

Starting your own peer-reviewed journal publishing company out of your institution can save - and make - your department a lot of much-needed funding. With so many other groups doing this, it’s not a difficult endeavor. But there are pros and cons and many steps to getting an academic peer-reviewed journal off the ground and into success.

If you’re considering publishing your own journals to save or bring in some money to your academic department, keep these tips in mind:

●      First, determine the purpose of the journal and who you want your audience to be. Stick to these factors as your journal grows or you could find yourself going where the money is instead of where your academic principles were grounded.

●      Money is always going to be a factor in a startup. Who will your funders be and what will they expect in return?

●      You can’t run an entire publishing company by yourself. How will the staff involve in the publishing components be determined? Who will do what jobs, how will they be reimbursed, where will they work, etc.?

●      The legitimacy of your peer review process will ultimately attract researchers to your publishing company. What kind of peer review process will you employ? How will you ensure its relevancy?

●      Digital formats are easy to use and store archived works on, but most databases don’t allow unlimited storage space and you must account for security. How will your electronic database be set up and secured?

From setting up the brand and copyright processes to securing funding and determining your copyediting and peer review process, much of the work in approaching the management of a peer-reviewed journal is done upfront.

After you dig deep in the beginning to ensure you’ve created a solid step-by-step manual that accounts for everything you’ll need during the publishing process of each journal, the heavy lifting is done. Each journal will require little tweaks, but for the most part, your publishing company will run on automated policies.

Impactio Puts the Research Accomplishments Together

When you’re ready to publish high-quality content, you need to have a program that you can trust. Impactio is an all-in-one platform used by expert scholars all over the world to create professional profiles.

Whether you’re looking for a program to track your work’s impact through citation indicators or engage in the community, Impactio does it all! And with a global community of other academic experts, you can network with a wide audience of your peers to generate more peer review opportunities for your journal!