Running a scholarly journal is not easy - Featured

Running a Scholarly Journal is Not Easy. Here’s Why.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

From the outside, running a scholarly journal might look like a respectable side gig for seasoned academics—review a few articles, polish some editorial notes, publish a couple of issues a year, and voilà: knowledge is served. Reality, of course, is far messier.

Behind every published article lies a network of frantic email chains, delayed reviewer responses, formatting chaos, ethical landmines, and budget black holes. Running a scholarly journal is not just about scholarship; it’s about diplomacy, stamina, and, frankly, a touch of masochism.

Let’s take a comprehensive look at why running a scholarly journal is anything but easy. We’ll unpack the layers—from editorial hurdles and peer review bottlenecks to financial fragility, metrics obsession, digital demands, and the quiet burnout that plagues academic editors everywhere. So, grab your coffee (you’ll need it)—and let’s step into the storm.

The Submission Avalanche: Quantity Over Quality

The deluge begins with submissions. Every editor dreams of receiving groundbreaking manuscripts that push disciplinary boundaries. What they get, more often than not, is a pile of hastily written papers, rehashed conference presentations, and some poor soul who clearly misunderstood the journal’s scope.

It’s not uncommon for a mid-tier journal to receive hundreds of submissions a year, especially if the journal is open access and free to publish. Yet only a small percentage of these may be suitable for peer review. The rest? They take time to assess, reject, and communicate—each one eating into editorial hours.

Then comes the growing phenomenon of “journal shopping,” which involves authors submitting simultaneously to multiple journals in defiance of ethical standards or, worse, using AI-generated papers that look superficially plausible but fall apart under scrutiny.

The rise of AI tools like ChatGPT has made it easier to write submissions. It’s also made it harder to assess originality. Editors now need to become human lie detectors and AI sleuths—because nothing screams fun like Googling paragraphs to check if they were lifted from Reddit threads.

Peer Review: The Sacred Cow That Often Wanders Off

Peer review is supposed to be the crown jewel of scholarly publishing—an assurance of quality, objectivity, and integrity. In practice, it’s often a chaotic blend of ghosting, vague feedback, personal vendettas, and Herculean delays.

Finding reviewers is a mission on its own. Many academics dodge review requests like they’re spam calls. Those who accept often deliver reviews after 3–4 reminders (if at all). Some went MIA. Journals, desperate to keep timelines sane, may resort to reviewing papers themselves—effectively editing and refereeing at the same time.

Even when peer reviews do come in, they’re uneven. Some are brilliant, insightful, and constructive. Others are single sentences: “Good article. Publish it.” Or worse: “This is trash.” In both cases, the editor is left to interpret the mess, reconcile disagreements, and ensure fairness.

Some journals are experimenting with open peer review, collaborative review, or post-publication commentary, but uptake remains patchy. Tradition dies hard in academia, especially when tied to the tenure review system.

Editorial Workload: The Most Underrated Academic Job

Let’s be clear—editing a scholarly journal is not just “checking grammar.” It’s project management, people management, crisis management, and, yes, occasionally tech support.

Editors are responsible for:

  • Vetting submissions
  • Selecting reviewers
  • Managing revisions
  • Copyediting and proofing
  • Coordinating with publishers and platforms
  • Responding to authors (diplomatically)
  • Upholding publication ethics
  • Indexing and archiving
  • Updating metadata and DOI registrations

Most of this is unpaid.

Many editors are full-time academics already juggling teaching, research, supervision, and committees. Working the editorial desk becomes something you do at night, on weekends, or during conference coffee breaks—invisible labor that gets little institutional recognition.

The emotional toll is real. Editorial burnout isn’t just about fatigue; it’s about the psychological grind of constant gatekeeping, perpetual inbox guilt, and feeling like you’re the only one holding the house up with duct tape.

Financial Realities: Big Dreams, Tiny Budgets

Most journals are broke.

Unless you’re backed by a large publisher or a major institution, chances are your journal is running on volunteer time, grants, or duct-taped budgets. Hosting, DOI registration, platform maintenance, archiving—all these cost money.

If the journal is open access (which it probably should be), there’s pressure to waive Article Processing Charges (APCs) to ensure equity. But waiving fees doesn’t mean the work disappears. Somebody’s still editing, reviewing, typesetting, and uploading. The difference is now no one’s getting paid.

Subscription-based journals face their own decline. Libraries are slashing budgets, and Big Deals are losing favor. Smaller journals find themselves squeezed out—neither open enough to attract readers nor prestigious enough to justify subscriptions.

So editors get creative. Some switch to university-hosted platforms like OJS. Others crowdsource funding or create hybrid models. But it all adds another layer of stress: now you’re not just an editor, you’re a fundraiser too.

Metrics Madness: Impact Factors and the Prestige Game

Here’s the rub: researchers want to publish in journals with high impact factors. But journals only get high impact factors if they attract high-quality submissions. And high-quality submissions go to… journals with high impact factors. Welcome to the prestige paradox.

Journals trying to “break in” often find themselves stuck in limbo—publishing decent work but getting overlooked by citation metrics. It’s demoralizing for editors, and it affects everything from indexing eligibility to institutional support.

To chase metrics, some journals start optimizing titles, nudging authors toward citation-heavy literature, or focusing on trending topics. The goal becomes not just publishing good work but publishing citable work.

It’s not always ethical. Citation cartels—where journals or authors excessively cite each other—are a known issue. Impact factor manipulation has become an art form, and some journals quietly play along just to survive.

Meanwhile, newer metrics like altmetric scores and h5-indexes promise a broader view, but adoption is slow, and traditional ranking systems still dominate hiring, funding, and promotion.

Predatory Journals: The Shadow Side of Open Access

The rise of open access has brought immense benefits—but also baggage.

Predatory journals exploit the open access model by charging APCs without delivering legitimate peer review or editorial processes. They look polished on the surface, with fake editorial boards and fabricated indexing claims, but they contribute nothing to scholarly discourse.

For legitimate OA journals, this is more than just a nuisance. It’s reputational damage by association. Authors and institutions become skeptical of newer journals, fearing they may accidentally fall into a predatory trap.

Worse, some predatory journals manage to get indexed in less-vigilant databases, polluting the academic record and undermining trust.

Legitimate journals now spend time promoting their own value and proving that they’re not part of a scam.

Tech Troubles: Platforms, Plugins, and Preservation

Running a journal today means navigating a tangle of tech platforms: manuscript tracking systems, XML workflows, DOI integration, archiving tools, metadata exports, citation styles, and so on.

Systems like Open Journal Systems (OJS) are a lifeline for many journals. But even these require hosting, customization, training, and troubleshooting. And when the tech breaks, the editor is often the de facto IT support.

Long-term preservation is another beast. LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico—these are acronyms that editors have to learn fast. Without proper archiving, published articles risk disappearing into the digital ether. It’s the academic equivalent of publishing on disappearing ink.

And don’t forget accessibility. PDF is no longer enough. Journals are now expected to offer mobile-optimized versions, metadata-rich HTML, and machine-readable formats. Failure to do so means lower discoverability and fewer citations.

Ethical Minefields: Retractions, Plagiarism, and Power

Scholarly publishing has never been immune to ethical lapses. But the stakes are higher now.

Editors must be prepared to deal with plagiarism, data fabrication, ghostwriting, unethical authorship practices, and conflicts of interest. These aren’t rare occurrences—they’re occupational hazards.

Handling misconduct requires tact, documentation, and sometimes legal guidance. Retractions are necessary but complicated. So are corrections and expressions of concern. COPE guidelines help, but every case has its nuances.

Power dynamics add another layer. Junior researchers may be pressured to add unmeritorious co-authors, senior scholars may resist editorial feedback, and editors themselves may face pressure from their institutions, publishers, or even government bodies to accept or reject certain work.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): The Ongoing Challenge

Journals have a responsibility to be inclusive, not just in authorship, but in editorial representation, reviewer diversity, and citation practices.

Too often, the editorial board is a homogenous group from a narrow band of institutions, mostly in the Global North. Submissions from the Global South may face linguistic bias, methodological skepticism, or outright rejection due to unfamiliar framing.

Journals need to actively address this imbalance through multilingual support, mentorship programs, editorial diversification, and equitable policies. But like everything else in publishing, this requires time, training, and resources.

Inclusion isn’t just a checkbox; it’s a structural overhaul. And not every journal is ready for that conversation.

Case Study: A Day in the Life of a Journal Editor

Consider Dr. Ann Hellen K., managing editor of a mid-tier journal in education. In a single day, she juggles:

  • Rejecting twelve AI-generated submissions
  • Reminding six reviewers about overdue reviews (six weeks late)
  • Mediating between an author and a reviewer over a dispute on “theoretical depth”
  • Dealing with a server crash on OJS during a submission spike
  • Drafting an editorial policy on citation ethics

Her reward? A late-night email from an angry author whose paper was rejected after two months of silence—and no institutional recognition because her editorial role “doesn’t count as research output.”

Multiply Ann Hellen’s story by hundreds, and you get a sense of the hidden labor sustaining academia’s publishing engine.

Conclusion

Indeed, running a scholarly journal is not easy. It is not for the faint of heart. It’s intellectually rewarding, yes—but also emotionally draining, logistically complex, and often thankless.

Still, journals remain at the heart of academic discourse. They provide legitimacy, structure, and continuity to fields of knowledge. But for them to thrive in the future, the systems that support them must evolve toward transparency, equity, sustainability, and sanity.

We need better tools, smarter metrics, and fairer funding. Above all, we need to recognize the labor involved—not just in tenure reviews but also in institutional priorities and academic culture.

Because one thing’s certain: without journals, scholarship doesn’t move. And without editors, journals don’t exist.

Let’s not forget that.

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