Most academic journal editorships are finite. Board positions tend to have fixed terms, and even when they don’t, editors will usually step down at some point to give others a chance to take over their role.
When editor transitions occur, especially for the editor-in-chief (EIC) post, it’s often up to managing editors to facilitate the process, serving as the glue connecting past and present academic editors, peer reviewers, and leadership at the publishing organization. Since every ME will likely be in this scenario eventually, it’s wise to prepare in advance — especially in case of unexpected transitions!
At Scholastica, we’ve supported hundreds of journals using our peer review and publishing software, and in that process we’ve observed what works during board changes and where challenges can occur. In this blog post, we’re rounding up tips to ensure smooth editor transitions and embrace the journal development opportunities that come with them.
You can use the quick links below to jump to specific sections!
Table of Contents
- Keep an up-to-date editorial process guide
- Ensure your process guide is comprehensive but easy to skim
- Consider creating an FAQs sheet specifically for editor onboarding
- Ask outgoing editors to document auxiliary roles they had that need to be filled
- Offer new editors technical training (and take the opportunity to catch up on software updates!)
- Share your strategic plans with prospective and incoming editors
- Get to know the communication style of incoming editors — especially EICs
- Embrace editor transitions as a time for innovation
- Putting it all together
Keep an up-to-date editorial process guide
After working together for a long time, journal teams can sometimes take for granted that the institutional knowledge they’ve acquired and the specific workflows they’ve developed won’t be second nature to new editors. That’s why it’s so important to develop an editorial process guide outlining your publication policies and procedures — and to keep it current!
A well-designed editorial process guide should be more than an operations manual. It should capture your journal’s editorial philosophy, standardize decision-making, preserve institutional knowledge, and provide editors with a reliable resource they can consult throughout their tenure. Key areas to cover in your guide include:
- Journal overview: Provide context about your journal, including the publication mission, aims and scope, editorial structure, target audience, publisher details, and the relationship between the publisher and the editorial office.
- Editorial roles and responsibilities: Clearly define the different editor roles within your organization (e.g., EIC, deputy or senior editors, associate editors, etc.) and, for each role, explain their primary responsibilities and decision-making authority.
- Editorial Policies: Document your journal’s editorial standards, including your peer review model, how you ensure editorial independence, and your appeals process. Also cover your policies for conflict of interest (COI) disclosures, ethical AI use, authorship and contribution criteria, and handling authorship disputes. Additionally, include your data sharing and preprinting policies, as well as any open access publishing options you offer.
- Research integrity procedures: Detail how you assess submissions for potential misconduct, such as running manuscripts through plagiarism and image manipulation detection systems. Also document your process for handling allegations of misconduct and issuing corrections and retractions. Be sure to detail escalation procedures for appeals and ethical concerns (i.e., who should be notified when issues arise, who needs to weigh in, etc.).
- Submission and peer review workflow: This will likely be the largest section of your editorial process guide, covering how you manage manuscripts from submission through publication. Include details on your procedures for handling submission intake, technical checks, editor assignments, editorial triage/desk review, peer review, revision rounds, publication decisions, and handoffs to production. A workflow diagram is particularly helpful here!
- Reviewer guidelines: Define your journal’s criteria for selecting peer reviewers, your target number of reviewers per submission, the database and/or search tools you use to do that, and your expectations for reviewer conduct (e.g., timeliness, confidentiality, constructive feedback).
- Editorial decision guidelines: Detail your journal’s manuscript quality expectations, novelty criteria, methodological standards, and ethical requirements. Also include guidance on when to issue desk rejections, make a transfer offer (if applicable), reject after the initial peer review round, or send an R&R request, with details on your final decision-making process. For example, some Scholastica Peer Review users collect internal decision recommendations from stakeholder editors before drafting a decision letter.
- Key journal performance metrics: To help editors understand publication trends and what success looks like, include journal performance metrics and any targets you’ve set for submission volume, acceptance rate, time to first decision, time to publication, reviewer acceptance rate, reviewer turnaround time, and citation rate.
- Annual editorial calendar: It can also be helpful to provide a bird’s-eye view of your annual editorial schedule for meetings, new issues, and publication development work, including special issue planning and releases, reviewer recognition, journal performance reporting, policy reviews, impact assessment, and strategic planning.
Ensure your process guide is comprehensive but easy to skim
How you set up your editorial process guide is just as important as its contents. If your guide is cumbersome to get through, people will be much less likely to use it. So make it skimmable!
We recommend organizing process guides by journal workflow area, so editors can quickly find procedural information they’re seeking while handling submissions. For example, if a new editor needs a refresher on the protocol for sending an accepted manuscript to production, they should be able to jump right to that stage of your guide. It’s also helpful to include flowcharts illustrating your journal workflows for peer review and production so editors can get a high-level picture of each stage of your publication lifecycle.
For process flowcharts, we recommend linking the boxes for each workflow stage to the associated section of your editorial process guide to connect those two resources.
Quick tip: Be sure to use an easy-to-edit format for your editorial process guide and any accompanying visuals you create so you can modify them as needed. Working in shared files with tools like Google Docs or Dropbox can be really helpful for this.
Consider creating an FAQs sheet specifically for editor onboarding
As you develop your editorial process guide, we recommend asking your seasoned editors to harken back to their onboarding experiences and any information they couldn’t find in journal documentation that they wish they had upfront. Those are questions to address now!
You can either incorporate them into your process guide or create an accompanying FAQs sheet. An FAQ sheet can be particularly helpful for addressing questions specific to onboarding and handling manuscript evaluation edge cases a new editor might encounter in their first few months on the job.
For example, editorial evaluation edge-case questions might include:
- What if a reviewer submits an unprofessional or hostile review?
- What if a reviewer misses multiple deadlines?
- How should I respond to an upset author?
- What if I recognize an author despite manuscript anonymization?
- Who covers my manuscripts if I’m unavailable?
- Is it okay to ask another editor for a second opinion?
- How does the journal handle in-progress manuscripts during editor transitions?
The answers to these questions will vary by publication. Align with your team on your chosen approaches to handling each scenario and document that institutional knowledge. As always, we encourage editors to review the many resources from the Committee on Publication Ethics for addressing ethics-related concerns. The Council of Science Editors and EASE also have a breadth of resources on various editorial topics.
Be sure to treat your FAQs sheet as a living resource, just like your process guide! If you have a large editorial board or work with a press with many people to keep tabs on, you might also consider adding a “Whom do I ask?” section with the names, contact information, and areas of expertise for anyone new editors may need to get in touch with while at your journal.
Quick tip: When discussing anything related to software in your editorial process guide, link to vendor help documents and training videos for more information on system functionality, rather than creating your own, so you’re always directing editors to the most up-to-date information. Scholastica users can visit our help center to find our user guides for journal editors, authors, reviewers, and publishers.
Ask outgoing editors to document auxiliary roles they had that need to be filled
Another critical step to prepare for editor transitions that teams don’t always think about is taking stock of the auxiliary roles editors inevitably adopt during their tenure.
For example, as discussed by Craig Denegar and David Perrin in a past Science Editor article on EIC transitions, at some journals the EIC may play a role in budgeting and financial planning or even handle vendor billing. Over time, it’s also common for some editors to become the “go-to person” for specific tasks, like pulling data from your peer review system and compiling reports.
You don’t want to be in a situation where just one editor knows how to handle certain technical functions or administrative work. If they leave abruptly, that can cause undue frustration for everyone who has to figure out how they completed those tasks. To avoid that scenario, it’s best to get ahead of it by asking editors to list out any duties they complete that aren’t covered in your editorial process guide and compile instructions with related files as applicable.
For example, your EIC may have a budget-tracking system that their successor can take over, or that editor who always pulls KPI reports may have a spreadsheet with prefilled formulas that others can use. Make sure they’re not the only ones who know about those things!
Offer new editors technical training (and take the opportunity to catch up on software updates!)
A big part of editor transitions is orienting new team members to your journal peer review and publishing software. If a new editor is unfamiliar with the tools you use, be sure to direct them to onboarding guides or videos provided by your software provider, like Scholastica’s help center. It’s a good idea to give the editor a chance to poke around the platform before getting started or to schedule a time to formally train them on how to use it.
If you plan to give your new editor a software walk-through, we recommend checking in with your vendor(s) to see how they can help. For example, Scholastica offers free training to new journal users as well as customer support. We also record journal training sessions when requested so editorial teams can send them to new editors to watch on demand.
As you prepare to onboard editors to your journal management and publishing software, it’s also an opportunity to get caught up on the latest updates made to those systems that you might not have been aware of. We recommend checking vendor product update pages or blog posts to get the scoop on recent product improvements and ensure you’re taking advantage of them!
For example, you can check Scholastica’s new feature blog posts for information on all our latest updates like improved R&R deadline tracking, support for manuscript transfers, and more!
Share your strategic plans with prospective and incoming editors
Now that we’ve talked about in-the-weeds documentation and training considerations for new editors, let’s pan out to strategic plans for your journal program. It might not seem like an onboarding consideration on the surface, but communicating the publication development areas you’re focused on to new editors is essential.
In a recent Scholastica blog interview, Erin Landis, Founder and CEO of Landis Editorial Consulting, discussed the importance of strategic planning at the portfolio and journal level to formalize and hone your publication mission, vision, and near-term priorities. She noted that strategic plans can be particularly helpful for succession planning by serving as a publication roadmap for incoming editorial leadership to follow and build upon, especially new EICs.
During her time as Vice President of Publications for the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), Landis said that she would share an overview of AGA’s strategic plan for its journals with prospective EICs and ask them how they anticipated fulfilling those objectives. She and her team would then review the responses to help determine whether the candidate was the best fit for the job.
Giving incoming editors insight into your strategic plans, particularly EICs, is also a great way to help them hit the ground running by providing context around where your publishing program currently stands, the initiatives you’re already working on (e.g., a new reviewer recruitment program), as well as challenges you need to address (e.g., gaps in article-level metadata).
As Denegar and Perrin discussed in their Science Editor article on EIC transitions, it’s critical to not only share your publication goals but also the struggles you have:
“At the time of the transition, a new EIC inherits the problems and concerns already inherent in an organization. An incoming EIC should be able to set an agenda with full knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the organization, as well as any potential threats to success. Little can derail an agenda more rapidly or extensively than needing to address difficulties hidden by a predecessor.”
Transparency is essential to effective editor onboarding.
As a managing editor, you may need to consult with people higher up in your publishing organization to request access to strategic publication plans or permission to share highlights from them with prospective or incoming editors. It’s worth taking those steps to help ensure your team’s success and demonstrate leadership in and beyond your role.
Get to know the communication style of incoming editors — especially EICs
Now, a quick word on communication! Every editor has a different communication style. Taking the time to understand those preferences early can help new team members build strong working relationships and prevent unnecessary misunderstandings.
For example, some EICs prefer detailed email updates, while others appreciate concise summaries or quick check-in meetings. Some like to discuss decisions collaboratively, while others prefer to review recommendations independently before weighing in, and so forth.
During onboarding, managing editors can learn these preferences by asking questions about how the new editor likes to communicate. For EICs, that might include:
- What’s your preferred method of communication for day-to-day questions (email, messaging platform, phone, etc.)?
- How often do you like to receive status updates, and in what format?
- Are there reports or metrics you’d like reviewed regularly, and how would you like to be briefed about them?
- How would you like urgent issues to be escalated?
- Would you like me to include my recommendation when presenting an issue?
- Which types of decisions would you like to make personally, and which are you comfortable delegating?
- If you’re unavailable, how would you like urgent editorial matters handled?
Establishing these expectations from the outset will not only make day-to-day collaboration more efficient, but also help foster trust and confidence among your team as the new editor settles into their role. As with any relationship, communication preferences may evolve, so it’s worth checking in periodically to ensure your approach continues to meet the editor’s needs.
Quick tip: Take advantage of the communication tools available to you! For example, we always encourage Scholastica Peer Review System users to leverage our built-in email feature, Discussions, so all their manuscript-related communication is threaded in the system and connected to the manuscript it’s about. Users can respond to Discussions via our platform or their email.
Embrace editor transitions as a time for innovation
In addition to a change in board membership, editor transitions, particularly in the case of a new EIC, will likely result in ideas for changes to your journal overall. While that can sometimes feel nerve-wracking for already busy teams, it’s ultimately something to embrace — with some guardrails to avoid veering too far off your publication course (more on that below)!
A new EIC will bring a fresh perspective to your journal processes and may spot ways to make peer review and publishing more efficient, whether by changing up how your editors work or the journal management software that you work with. New editors may also have ideas to enhance the transparency of your peer review and publishing processes, your publication brand positioning, or the structure of your journal — from your website design to the scope of your issues and the sections they include.
For example, Dr. Simine Vazire, former EIC of Collabra: Psychology, discussed some of the initiatives they introduced at the journal during a past Scholastica user interview, including implementing the Registered Reports two-stage peer review model, where authors first submit their study methodology and hypotheses to the journal to evaluate the rigor of the experimental design. If the protocol is approved, the journal issues an in-principle acceptance, committing to publish the results regardless of whether they are positive, negative, or null, provided the researcher follows the approved plan, which is assessed in a subsequent peer review round. Many journals have adopted the Registered Reports model to help reduce publication bias and promote more transparent and reproducible science.
Dr. Vazire also spearheaded Collabra: Psychology’s transition to a transparent peer review model, which the journal still follows, as discussed by Vazire’s successor, Dr. Don van Ravenzwaaij, in a Scholastica Community Conversation on the benefits of transparent peer review and how to get started.
When incoming EICs lead novel publishing initiatives like these, it can help catapult journals into new conversations and significantly enhance the value of their content within academia and the wider world.
Of course, your journal team doesn’t want to have a situation where a new EIC comes in and tries to drastically change editorial processes or your publishing plans in a way that could derail the progress you’ve made towards goals you’ve been working towards. As discussed by Erin Landis, sharing a strategic plan for your publications is also a way to avoid that situation by setting clear journal priorities that incoming editors can build upon but that are inherent to your publishing program and not tied to an individual editor’s term.
Putting it all together
Editor transitions can be a busy and stressful time both for new editors and current board members. But they can also be an exciting opportunity to improve your journal’s internal organization, publishing processes, and promotional efforts.
New editors bring fresh energy and ideas to the table that can revitalize the whole team. Treating editor changeovers as a time to re-evaluate your journal processes, both to clearly communicate them to incoming editors and to spot areas where you may be able to improve, can make transition periods easier and more innovative for everyone involved.
