As an academic journal, balancing your incoming submissions volume with your editorial capacity is crucial to efficiency and scaling. Yet academic publishing, just like other industries, has its busy periods. And if you’re not careful, these busy periods can create significant obstacles to operational success.
Understanding submission patterns in your discipline, planning editorial capacity around predictable busy periods, and developing communication strategies for managing author expectations during peak times ensures that your journal gets on top of article submission waves and editorial calendars.
Submission waves: how do submission volumes vary?
The volume of article submissions your journal receives in any given period depends on a variety of factors. These include the reputation of your journal, its visibility, and funding opportunities available to cover APCs. While these are largely mutable factors, submission volumes are generally always affected by a more obvious constant: the season.
Just like any other industry, academic publishing has its busy periods. But when are they? For certain scientific journals, submissions tended to be highest in the summer (June, July, and August) and autumn (October and November). The summer peak may be due to teaching and administrative tasks winding down, while the autumn peak may be due to academics working harder to achieve publication within that same calendar year and before the Christmas break.
Different disciplines also have different peak periods. For example, submissions to psychology journals tend to peak during summer, similar to scientific journals. Disciplines that are heavily influenced by conference cycles and rates of discovery, such as physics and computer science, are more likely to peak intermittently.
Planning editorial capacity around busy periods
Foresight and planning are your best methods of countering peak submission periods. If you know when your journal is most likely to receive a high volume of article submissions, then you can organize workflows and adjust your editorial capacity accordingly.
Start with an editorial calendar. Highlight the months where you foresee busy submission activity. If you’re a journal that’s been running for several years, try and work out the average submission volume for each calendar month to do so. When you’ve identified the busy months, ensure that other processes such as production are not going to be impacted by an upheaval in submissions. It may be necessary to adjust workflows and allocate extra staff if necessary.
Managing editorial capacity and sustaining momentum are key to keeping on top of submissions. Assign specific roles to team members so that work is delegated and miscommunications over responsibilities can be avoided. What you absolutely don’t want to deal with are “bottlenecks” caused by inefficient planning. These are points of congestion in workflows that impede productivity and cause further setbacks in other operational areas.
Let JAMS help you manage submissions and manuscript production
How to handle difficult editorial choices
An example of things going wrong
Imagine you’re a researcher and you’re looking for a journal to submit your latest research to. A colleague recommends you one based on a fast, positive publication experience they’d had with this journal in the past. Generally, the journal is known for its fast article submission turnaround times. So, you submit. However, weeks pass and you receive no update. The time it took for a decision on your colleague’s article to be communicated passes. Now you’re starting to doubt the reputation the journal has for quick article submission turnaround times. Not only that, but you decide to follow-up on the status of your submission with an email—it takes the journal five days to respond to your inquiry about the status of your submission. As well as looking inefficient, now the journal also looks neglectful of your needs.
But let’s look at it from the journal’s perspective. It turns out a peak period for their article submissions coincided with the researcher’s submission. On top of that, a key member in the journal’s editorial department unexpectedly had to take leave during this period. Suddenly workflows must be rearranged and submission processing stalls. Team members usually responsible for responding to email inquiries about submissions are covering other responsibilities. The journal isn’t being consciously neglectful, but it is failing to fulfil certain author expectations.
Communication strategies for managing author expectations
This negative perception of the journal could have been avoided if only the journal had been more transparent about waiting times for article submissions during busy periods.
Always set realistic expectations for your journal, even if you’ve been efficient with submission times in the past. Circumstances can change, and fast, and so it’s best to cover your back. Try not to overpromise on the submission time front while going the extra mile in terms of communication and building rapport with authors who submit to your journal.
In cases of rejecting a submission, provide clear feedback concerning areas of improvement and suggestions of alternative places to submit, if possible. If not, at the very minimum be respectful and show appreciation to the authors for taking the time to submit to your journal. If you’d like help with constructing rejection templates, see our article on handling difficult editorial decisions.