Editorial practice

This course is designed to help you become a successful editor of a scholarly journal. Whether you are starting your own journal or taking on the responsibility for an existing journal, you will find all of the basics covered in this course, as well as pointers toward more advanced topics.

Taylor & Francis's helpful overview of the main elements of running a journal including managing your editorial board and overseeing the peer review process.

From Times Higher Education: Editing an academic journal is a vital and rewarding task, but also time-consuming and often frustrating. Current and former editors advise would-be gatekeepers on why you'll need the skills of a ringmaster – and more.

"If you have queries about the status of the essay you’ve submitted to an academic journal, you’re likely dealing with the managing editor. If you’re working with a journal editor to copyedit your essay, you’re likely dealing with the managing editor. If you’re upset by an editor’s decision about your essay or you wonder what happened during peer review, you’re likely dealing with the managing editor. In each of these instances, managing editors are a central node in the network that produces a scholarly journal. They work with the reviewers, the journal editors, the copy editors, and the publishers who bring publications into the world."

"Our Academic Editors oversee the peer review process from beginning to end, taking responsibility for conducting an initial assessment based on the PLOS ONE publication criteria, finding and inviting reviewers, evaluating their feedback, making editorial decisions, and communicating decisions to authors."

Guidance on different editorial roles, organizing peer review, the overall workflow from submission to publication, and more.

The COPE guidelines “Editing peer reviews“ are intended to advise editors, publishers, and researchers on expected practices and appropriate circumstances regarding the editing of peer reviews. The guidelines look at the need for journals to amend peer reviews, and provide insight into situations where this might be an appropriate course of action. Journals should have clear policies on what is acceptable and unacceptable in a reviewer report regarding tone, language, and content, and advice on the extent to which a review can be edited to adhere to these policies. There are alternative methods for editors to deal with controversial content, and advice is given on how to respond to hostile or unprofessional reviews.

To maximize the outreach and impact of research it is important for journals to ensure that they provide suitable platforms for the dissemination of research information. Journal editors and publishers therefore have a responsibility to ensure that they are providing a quality platform for the publication of research. The purpose of this handbook is to pose the questions that will help journals to judge their level of efficiency, sustainability and quality against internationally accepted criteria.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) are scholarly organizations that have seen an increase in the number, and broad range in the quality, of membership applications. Our organizations have collaborated in an effort to identify principles of transparency and best practice for scholarly publications and to clarify that these principles form part of the criteria on which membership applications will be evaluated.

Use this checklist as a means to track your journal’s progress towards publishing best practices. Implementing these practices in your journal’s website and workflow will also help you meet the criteria for inclusion for major indexes such as the DOAJ and Scopus. These best practices were derived from the COPE Principles of Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing and the Directory of Open Access Journals standards for inclusion. Each checklist item has instructions and resources added at the end of this document.

Provides guidance on confidentiality, plagiarism, anonymity, and more.