Scalability and your journal are very deeply interwoven. Understanding where you want to be is critical and you should know where you want your journal to be in five to ten years before you even launch. Do you need to have a complete road map for every moment? No, but you should have a general idea of what you’re aiming for.
No one starting a journal intends to only publish a handful of papers a year forever. But your journal, on day one, is not going to be able to process thousands of manuscripts a month and hosting conferences.
So, what do you do to get from “day one” to “year ten”?
What is scalability?
Generally, scalability is a simple concept. It is the ability (of a journal, in this case) to change size and/or scale. It is your journal’s ability to handle growth without sacrificing things like efficiency and quality. For a your journal, transitioning from processing five manuscripts a week to ten means that you’re doubling your workload, but this should never be done at the expense of quality. A growth in your business that comes at the expense of quality might have short term benefits, but will also have long-term pain for your reputation.
Remember, that if your quality decreases, work will spread in the community, which in turn will impact your reputation. If you’re going to scale your business, you need to make sure that you’re not sacrificing your reputation to do it.
So, to scale effectively, what should you be looking at? Here are four important factors that we’ll be looking at here:
- Adaptability;
- Profits;
- Maintaining quality when scaling;
- Workloads and costs.
Each of these primary items has a major impact on how your journal is run.
Adaptability
The scalability of your journal hinges on your ability to adapt to changes. Some of these changes might not be easy to predict. But many of them are very easy to foresee, and, as a result, plan for. If you can plan for changes, adapting to them is much easier.
As we’ve mentioned before, running a journal smoothly is challenging. However, any system can can face issues, like bottlenecks. When a bottleneck is found, it slows the publishing process and needs to be addressed. Resource allocation, communication, or a lack of employees can all cause bottlenecks. Your ability to adapt to these problems as they arise are critical in succeeding. But what does adaptability mean here? In the context of adjusting to bottlenecks, it means to make sure that you have plans to increase your ability to process manuscripts or move staff around to do so.
Adaptability in the context of scaling your work doesn’t just have a single answer. Sometimes it can have multiple ways of doing it. You might have a streamlined training process, or you might be using a scalable journal management system. Whatever the case might be, you need to be able to adapt to changes as they happen.
Need an adaptable way to scale your journal? Let us help.
Profits
All businesses have the primary goal to make money. Without it, you don’t have a business. Employees need to be paid, rent needs to be paid, equipment needs to be bought, and so on.
But profits are also a place where many companies make mistakes. Assuming that a two-month increase in publications is a trend and then scaling too quickly can be a recipe for disaster. Being able to scale effectively is critical, and sometimes that means to scale back from a higher number. Profits are critical, and should be carefully observed (up or down) and then you can use this information to scale your journal effectively.
Maintaining quality when scaling
When you have more work to do, and you haven’t planned carefully, you will have less people, devoting more time, of less time, on more projects. If you haven’t planned for what happens if your submissions double overnight (possible at lower volumes, but more challenging when you’re processing hundreds of papers a month), you might run into problems of quality.
In these cases, there are two ideal ways to tackle this issue. The first is to have carefully planned out how you’re going to grow your business. Under what situations you’re going to hire staff, how you’re going to train them, and how you can effectively increase the amount of work that you’re able to manage on any given day. The other approach to this would be to use some form of journal management system that is designed to scale according to your needs.
Workloads and costs
We’ve gone over a few different factors to consider, but here we’re putting the workloads in relation to costs.
Much like tracking profits, it’s important for you to track the costs of your labour. For example, if you are processing a manuscript, how much does that cost you?
It seems a little bit excessive to ask about the exact dollars and cents of a manuscript, but having a general sense of what the “average costs” are is important. Roughly speaking, you can calculate this by estimating the number of hours an average manuscript takes to process multiplied by your employee’s hourly rate. To this, you add any costs associated with English editing or layout work. Doing this allows you to know how much you are paying per processed paper, as well as how much time that should be taking an employee. Employees cannot process 100 papers at a time, there simply isn’t enough time. So knowing what they can do, how much it costs, and then at what point you can use resources to better support your team is important.
Using scalable journal management tools
One of the most critical parts of managing a journal is to know how to distribute your resources. Many journals have opted to use journal management tools to ensure that minor, but time consuming, tasks are easily handled or largely automated. Making sure that your team has the best tools at their disposal will free up your team to handle important matters that take more time.
Make sure that whatever path you choose, that you’re keeping the scaling of your company in mind.