The driving goal of any journal is the identity of the journal in question—and when you’re publishing humanities or social sciences, the goals may be different from those of hard sciences.
Not necessarily in a broad way, though. Humanities and social sciences (often defined as HASS or AHSS, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences or Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences) journals still want to publish manuscripts, get impact factors, and so on. Journals, ultimately, are generally a business and need to turn a profit. But beyond the standard aims of most journals, there’s something else. The HASS landscape is sparsely populated. There are way more journals that cater to the “hard sciences” than to “the arts”.
Why is this the case?
Well, generally speaking, it comes down to money.
Running a journal that focuses on humanities or social sciences
When it comes to logistics, running a journal that has a focus on humanities/social sciences is no different than one that has a focus on the “hard sciences”.
This is to say that the day-to-day business of running a journal doesn’t change that much. Manuscripts are submitted. Manuscripts need to be sent for peer review. Then, accepted articles need to receive editing and layout.
And so on, and so forth.
Where running a humanities/social science journal differs is in its basic operations. For example, with a journal that deals with “physics”, as an example, you might have a much easier time finding subject matter experts than with “19th century Venetian art”. This means that when it comes to running a journal that focuses on more specialized matter, you need to keep time frames in mind. It will take longer to complete peer review in many cases, and this can impact the overall profitability of the journal.
Making money on humanities journals can be more challenging, but isn’t impossible. In fact, especially with open access becoming more and more common, there is a lot of opportunity to grow journals on a myriad of subjects. Open access has made running a journal successfully a little bit easier, but there is still a fair bit of resistance to this form of publishing. As with any journal, you will live or die by your reputation. It doesn’t matter if you’re publishing on cancers, physics, ballet or law, standards and making sure that you are publishing ethically is critical.
Journal profitability
As noted above (and previously), having a profitable journal that focuses on the sciences might be easier. This is usually because the sciences tend to be better-funded than many of the HASS subjects. Not only that, but when you consider some of the more famous journals that can truly fetch high rewards, those also tend to be more focused on natural sciences than anything in the humanities/social science spheres.
But picking a journal that you want to publish doesn’t always have to be about money. In fact, many people select subject matter based on their own education. In other cases, some people might run an HASS journal because they feel that there is a need for the subject matter. Where opportunity exists, there can be many approaches to dealing with it.
Selecting an HASS journal to run
Well, while HASS is often referred to as a single thing, it encompasses a very broad list of subjects. For example, the humanities are general considered to cover topics like literature, philosophy, history, and art. Importantly, it also covers language as a whole. The social sciences, on the other hand, tend to focus on “how humans behave and interact within societies.” As noted earlier, many people tend to align the journal that they establish with their own areas of expertise. Not only that, but while there is a lot of focus placed on the importance of the so-called “hard sciences”, to say that there is no place for psychology, economics, language, or art in society is simply not true.
What about publishing humanities and social science journals?
The bottom line about the publishing process is that it is still a process. While many people and at teams have lots of different approaches to this process, at the end of the day they are just a series of things that need to be done, step-by-step. This is true when it comes to journals as well as books.
Because these processes tend to be similar across journals (e.g., submission, peer review, editing, layout), many journal publishers will use a journal management system to help them. These management systems often automate processes like emails and the transfer of files from one team to another. In particular though, a journal management system can be crucial in the peer review stage.
Unlike natural sciences, the pool of peer reviewers on any given subject might be quite small. Because of this, having a system to help you organize your potential peer reviewers according to specific keywords can be a powerful tool in the publishing process.
Another important part of publishing a humanities or social sciences journal is to select a great editorial board. Your editorial board, aside form helping you to determine the direction of the journal, can also provide you with potential peer reviewers for articles that are submitted to the journal.