Select a scope and a title

Every journal has a unique name in the world of journals that includes a full name and a short name. These names both should be unique and individual. Besides, every journal should have a clearly described scope. Te scope of a journal should include a clear description of the subjects that a journal will accept manuscripts about them. Having a strict scope for the journal and respecting it in the process of publishing is very important and is a key to entering the archives.

Introduce the team of the journal

The team of a journal is the employees that will work in the journal. These people might be hired by the journal manager or might be employees of companies like DoNotEdit that remotely work for the journal. These people that their role are described below are the individuals that will manage the journal affairs and should trained for their roles. The selection of these members is very important as the journal management are mostly intellectual activities that needs deep attention, commitment and passion to be performed appropriately.

Find a publisher or funding source

The main issue in journal management in the first years is financial issues. So, finding a publisher or investor is strongly recommended. It is not accurate to try to manage the journal with its own budget. As this makes journal management risky and instability in access to funds makes the journal process fragile and irregular and irregularity and inconsistency in journal management are very crucial.

The publisher of a journal might be a publisher like DoNotEdit company which is just a publisher of academic journals or might be an academic institution, a relevant scientific association, a charity, a hospital, a clinic, or a governmental institution.

Who are the main members of a Journal team

The main people you should have in a journal are the editor-in-chief, the associate editor, the technical editor, the editorial board members, the team of editors and designers, the website specialists, and the public relations or social media expert. Some of these duties and positions might be mixed or outsourced to companies like DoNotEdit but the editor-in-chief and the editorial board should be unique although a scholar can play such roles at several journals simultaneously.

Launch the Journal website

The first encounter of the authors is with the journal website and this is very important to have an appropriate website for the journal. There are software applications designed for online journal management systems. These applications like OJS are commonly offered by the companies like DoNotEdit and should be outsourced as the journal team can not individually launch it.

Applying for the domain name and host is essential for the journal management system to run appropriately and be accessible for the authors and the readers.

Send the first call for papers

Call for papers is the main activity of the journals for submissions. The call for papers is commonly announced by email, ads on websites, or posters and is the main method to ask other scholars to submit their new research manuscripts in your journal. It even needs sometimes pay ads and apply email marketing methods to reach the proper audience that would submit. The submission rate has a direct and significant relationship with the indexing and impact factor of the journal. So, in the first days of the journal life when the indexing is poor and there is no impact factor, it is too difficult to absorb the authors and receive high-quality submissions. Subsequently the level or quality of the articles in the journal establishes its future growth of it.

Publish the first issue

As soon as you have 8 manuscripts you can publish the vol. one, issue one. It is not a very difficult job for an editor in chief that have substantial communication with colleagues. You should collect a list of colleagues and send them emails about your new journal and ask them to give one of their unpublished papers. Every researcher these days have multiple papers on his computer that are never published. Some of them might be incomplete or need some revisions. In this step, the editors should close their eyes and accept the papers without great and jaw-dropping ideas, although they should not neglect the ethical and methodological issues, even at this step. Because the discipline of the journal should be coherent and strict.

A method for finding submissions in this step is reviewing the archives of unpublished papers, like MedArchiv. Also, you might perform a search in proposal registries like Clinicaltrial.gov and ask the principal authors of the recently finalized proposals to send their reports to your journal. Especially the projects with negative or no findings.

Apply for ISSN

After publishing the first volume you might apply for ISSN. This is a local activity and each country have a council for the ISSN registry of its own citizens. This council is commonly the one used for registering new books. You might due to some reasons want to apply for ISSN from another country. It is a little bit more difficult and might need to contact an agency like DoNotEdit that is an expert in this issue. The list of ISSN registrar of countries can be found on the official ISSN.org website.

Try to develop the network

At this step, the most important role is to develop a network of authors and reviewers for the journal. Without a working group that links the authors expert in the journal subject field and the reviewers that are researchers with the same subject matter interest. Without this link no journal can survive. So, any journal might try to open accounts in social media networks, contact colleagues at the same subject matter by email and phone, participating in the relevant congresses and meetings, and other events. The editors should develop their network of scholars that might submit papers for their new journal or contact the companies like DoNotEdit with a large network of scholars in various subject field to expand their trustworthy by scholars.

Apply for low to moderate-level archives

After publishing one or two issues, you might apply for many archiving databases of scientific journals. There are plenty of archives that very fast and easily a new journal can be submitted in them (e.g.g Google Scholar, DOAJ, Index Copernicus). These archives are not very high ranked, but the new journals become visible and

Publish regularly

One of the very important and crucial issues in journal publishing is regular publishing, so you should reach an archive of accepted articles to be able to publish regularly and on time. Otherwise after one or two issues you will find no to little acceptable manuscripts to publish.

Even it is suggested to try to collect some manuscripts prior to launching the first issues. It will guarantee that in the difficult first weeks and months you will not run out of papers.

Publishing on time is one of the main issues to be respected and followed during the life of a journal from the first days. Reviewing many journals, you might see that the first issues are not published regularly, the fact is that any issue outdated or low-numbered is not considered appropriate by the main archives and the journal will earn negative points.

Be active on Social media

Being active in social media including Twitter, LinkedIn and ResearchGate is very important for journals. As it makes them a social entity that can be visited, debated and challenged by the scholars of the same field. In this situation is that the journal become viable and will be considered active by the scholar and they will attracted to interact with the journal. It is important that the audience of a journal are not just those who submit, but also they are those how

Apply for Scopus as soon as you have published four issues

As soon as you have published four issues with 40 papers, you can apply for Scopus indexing. This is a start to reaching the journal rankings and finding a ranking score within the journals ranking system of Scopus database that is available here. But it is not all the case, as you should obtain almost all criteria that Scopus asks the journals to be listed and ranked and if not to be eligible might face an lag time of six months up yo four years as a penalty or break time to reach the criteria of this archive.

Apply for COPE

Ethical considerations are very important for the current journals, especially in health and medicine. So, the ethical considerations should be respected in the accepting articles. These considerations are at too main sections, the first respecting the ethical regulations in the research project that a the scientific report of it is submitted to the journal. This research project should have a valid ethical code, should have clinical trial registry code (if applies), should have obtained the informed consent of the patients or participants. The study should have respected the animal protections laws if have been studying on animal subjects.

Besides, there are for research reports that should be respected, these includes the plagiarism issues and other research frauds that are listed in COPE website for scientific reporting. Both types of ethical issues should be presented in the website of the journal and it is important that these webpages be written professionally and this is another service that DoNotEdit would help the new journal editors to do it.

Finally, applying the COPE guidelines for ethical considerations is very important and it can be done by outsourcing to the companies like DoNotEdit as well. The detail about how a journal can be approved by COPE is listed in the website of this group and also it is important to ensure the authors that these rules will be remained unchanged.

Try to improve your journal citations

The core point for improvement of a journal is the citation to its publications by other journals. So it is one of the most important issues of the journals to have other journals to cite to your journal. The fact is that the papers are cited by other authors when the findings of them are valuable. But, naturally the journals with higher impact or better indexing and archives are more visible and with the same level of content, they have a higher chance of citations. So, in the young age of a journal, its team should try to attract the other authors attention to their journal and ask for citations more actively.

Take home message

Opening a medical journal is a difficult but delicious activity that takes several years to be fully developed and reach to stability and income. But, it will bring reputation and successful communications for the journal owners that worth it. But it should not be forgotten that this works should be performed based on the standards and the regulations, otherwise the attempts of team will be useless and there are many journals that expire after few months or years due to misconceptions, mismanagement and poor communications.

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