What Makes Running an Academic Journal So Difficult?

The Hidden Headache: What Makes Running an Academic Journal So Difficult?

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Running an academic journal sounds prestigious. The title alone conjures images of tweed jackets, intellectual debates, and thoughtful peer reviews. But ask anyone who has actually managed one, and you’ll quickly get a different story. Behind the formal editorials and polished PDFs lies a chaotic machine of unpaid labor, technical bottlenecks, and bureaucratic gymnastics. From struggling to find willing reviewers to dealing with aggressive indexing criteria, running a journal is a delicate balancing act that can be more headache than halo.

Academic journals sit at the heart of the knowledge economy, serving as the primary medium through which research gets certified, disseminated, and cited. But the machinery behind these publications is often underfunded, understaffed, and expected to run flawlessly on academic goodwill. This article dissects what makes running a scholarly journal so difficult—from editorial demands to peer review gridlock, from technical infrastructure to political gamesmanship—and why these problems are rarely visible to the outside world.

The Myth of the Academic Editor as Gatekeeper

Academic editors are often perceived as powerful gatekeepers, sitting atop ivory towers, deciding the fate of scholarly careers. In reality, most editors juggle their roles part-time, in addition to their full-time teaching, research, and administrative responsibilities. Many receive little to no compensation for their editorial duties. Their inboxes are flooded with submissions, reviewer declines, ethical complaints, and technical errors. Being a journal editor means acting as referee, therapist, traffic controller, and crisis manager, all while maintaining scholarly objectivity.

The myth of editorial power obscures the fact that editors often operate within constraints set by publishers, editorial boards, and external metrics. Journal policies are sometimes dictated more by indexing requirements and article processing charges (APC) models than by intellectual curiosity. Editors may wish to publish risky, interdisciplinary, or niche work but often find themselves drawn toward “safe” articles that boost citations and appeal to databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. The autonomy is often more symbolic than real.

Most academic editors are never trained for the job. They fall into it. A colleague nominates them, or a senior scholar retires, and suddenly they’re in charge. There’s no formal handbook, no onboarding, and very little institutional memory. What they inherit is a mix of email templates, spreadsheets, and the occasional Word document labeled “Editor Duties – 2014 Final.” While the job description may suggest intellectual leadership, most of the work is triage. Deciding what’s urgent, what’s legally compliant, what can be delayed, and what can be tactfully ignored.

This balancing act often comes with intense pressure. Editors must remain impartial in the face of institutional politics, professional rivalries, and fragile egos. Accept the wrong paper, and accusations of bias or incompetence might fly. Reject a paper from a big-name academic, and you could lose a supporter or even a funder. Editing is not just about selecting what’s best but also about surviving the process with your integrity and reputation intact.

Peer Review Is in Crisis (And Everyone Knows It)

Peer review is one of the most sacred but broken pillars of academic publishing. According to Clarivate’s 2022 Global State of Peer Review report, 60% of editors reported difficulty in finding willing reviewers, and about 43% of peer review invitations were declined. The workload is enormous, and the rewards are almost nonexistent. Reviewers don’t get paid. They rarely get credit. And they’re expected to provide thorough feedback on tight deadlines. No wonder peer review fatigue is now a crisis.

Let’s be blunt: peer review is currently a system that depends on favors and guilt. You agree to review because you feel obligated, not because you’re incentivized. While some platforms have introduced minor recognition systems, like Publons badges or ORCID logging, these aren’t meaningful in terms of career advancement. And yet, peer review remains the gold standard for certifying knowledge. That’s a bit like building a skyscraper on a foundation of Post-it notes.

Compounding this is the inconsistent quality of reviews. Some are insightful, clear, and helpful. Others are superficial or, worse, abusive. Editors must navigate between contradictory reviews, chase down slow reviewers, and sometimes rewrite entire decisions just to make them coherent. The psychological labor involved is invisible but profound. Every editor has a horror story involving a reviewer who ghosted after two reminders, or one who uploaded a single sentence: “I do not recommend publication. No further comment.”

Increasingly, editors are encountering AI-written content disguised as original scholarship. This introduces a new dimension to peer review: identifying what is real, what is machine-generated, and what may have been synthesized by a lazy author in five minutes using GPT. Reviewers, naturally, are not trained to handle this. And editors? They’re left Googling paragraphs and consulting AI-detection tools, most of which have their own false positives and biases.

Indexing Games and Citation Fetishism

For many journals, the ultimate validation is being indexed in major databases, such as Scopus, Web of Science, or PubMed. But the process to get there is hardly straightforward. It involves multiple layers of application, scrutiny, and feedback that can span several years. Journals must demonstrate consistency, international diversity, citation frequency, and adherence to ethical standards. Even if you do everything right, you might still get rejected for reasons like “limited visibility” or “insufficient academic reach.”

Editors end up tailoring their journals to meet indexing requirements rather than intellectual goals. This might mean increasing publication frequency to appear more prolific, or aggressively soliciting review articles because they tend to attract more citations. It also encourages a form of self-censorship among editors. Journals tend to steer clear of topics deemed “low citation potential,” such as regional studies or unconventional methodologies, even when they are critically important.

The obsession with citation metrics distorts editorial priorities. Editors are evaluated by their journal’s impact factor, not by the quality of the conversations their journal fosters. Some journals even go so far as to instruct authors to cite recent issues of the same journal, subtly inflating their own stats. This citation engineering may be effective in gaming the system, but it’s intellectually bankrupt.

One might argue that metrics offer transparency, but in practice, they create a feedback loop where prestige begets more prestige. High-impact journals attract top submissions, which receive more citations, thereby further raising the journal’s impact. Lesser-known journals struggle to gain recognition, regardless of their quality. It’s the publishing version of the rich getting richer.

Managing the Editorial Workflow: A Logistical Labyrinth

Running an academic journal is not just about reading papers. It’s a long chain of processes that includes submission triage, plagiarism checks, reviewer matching, editorial board discussions, formatting, typesetting, metadata creation, and XML conversion. Each step comes with its own tools, platforms, and delays. Many journals rely on legacy manuscript management systems that are clunky, unintuitive, and expensive. Others try to stitch together free tools like Google Forms, Dropbox, and email chains, which inevitably break down under pressure.

Let’s not forget the submission pile. At any given time, editors might be managing dozens—or hundreds—of papers at different stages of review. A paper could be awaiting reviewer assignment, stuck in revision limbo, or lost in production. If there’s no centralized tracking or dashboard, the process breaks down. An editor might discover that a paper accepted three months ago was never forwarded to the layout team. Or that a reviewer submitted comments that somehow never reached the author. Human error multiplies with scale.

A typical editorial workflow involves multiple handoffs. From authors to editors, from editors to reviewers, from reviewers back to editors, and eventually to production. Every handoff is a risk point. One missed email or broken link can delay publication by weeks. And since many journals only publish quarterly or biannually, such delays can snowball into missed issues or publication backlogs.

Furthermore, journals are required to meet evolving technical standards. Indexing agencies now require machine-readable metadata, structured abstracts, ORCID integrations, and XML outputs that are compatible with databases. Most editors didn’t sign up to be metadata specialists or DTD technicians. Yet they’re expected to understand how CrossRef works, how to mint DOIs, and how to validate JATS XML files.

The Financial Tightrope

Publishing costs money. Real money. Even so-called “diamond” open access journals, which don’t charge authors or readers, still have bills to pay. Hosting, DOI registration, copyediting, layout design, archiving, and software licenses all come with costs. Many journals scrape by with small grants, university subsidies, or funds from their respective societies. And those funds are rarely guaranteed. Budget cuts or leadership changes can jeopardize a journal’s future overnight.

Let’s talk numbers. Registering DOIs through CrossRef isn’t free; journals must pay annual membership fees and per-article fees. Hosting platforms like Open Journal Systems (OJS) may be open-source, but the server infrastructure, backups, and tech support are not. A professionally typeset PDF can cost between $50 and $200 per article. Archiving in LOCKSS or CLOCKSS requires additional fees. And if a journal wants long-term indexing in databases, some require submission fees or compliance certifications.

To mitigate costs, some journals turn to APCs, where authors pay to publish. This model is financially viable, but it is also ethically fraught. It creates access barriers for scholars in the Global South, early-career researchers, and anyone without grant support. Editors face a brutal choice: accept more APC-funded papers to stay solvent or uphold strict quality thresholds and risk insolvency.

A growing number of journals are turning to consortia models, crowdfunding, or institutional partnerships to remain afloat. But these require negotiation skills, long-term planning, and constant advocacy. Editors must wear the hats of fundraisers and strategists, all while managing manuscripts. It’s no wonder burnout is the default setting.

Ethics, Retractions, and the Nightmare of Misconduct

No one tells you how many ethical dilemmas you’ll face as a journal editor. From undisclosed conflicts of interest to plagiarism, data fabrication, or image manipulation, misconduct is disturbingly common. Journals have to investigate complaints, consult COPE guidelines, coordinate retractions, and manage potential legal fallout, all without dedicated legal teams. The emotional toll is real. Accusations of bias or incompetence can tarnish reputations and lead to the resignation of editors.

The process of managing retractions alone is enough to induce ulcers. Retractions must be issued transparently, clearly labeled, and indexed appropriately, often while legal threats loom in the air. Authors may contest the decision. Institutions may get involved. Lawyers may be consulted. All this over a single paper. And the kicker? Most journals don’t have a standard workflow for this. They invent policy as they go, hoping it doesn’t backfire.

Beyond clear-cut fraud, editors must also navigate the ethical gray zone. What about articles that recycle content from earlier work without proper citation? Or authors who split one study into five micro-papers just to pad their CVs, a practice lovingly called “salami slicing”? Then there are AI-generated articles submitted under real names, data harvested without consent, or ghost authorship, where corporations shape the conclusions. It’s a minefield, and most editors are not trained ethicists.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) provides flowcharts and advice, but interpreting them in real cases is rarely straightforward. Editors often end up playing the roles of investigator, mediator, and moral compass. They write apology letters, explain decisions to irate authors, and sometimes defend themselves in faculty meetings. It’s exhausting work that gets little recognition and even less institutional support.

Technology Isn’t Always the Savior

Digital tools are supposed to streamline workflows, but they often create new problems. Manuscript submission systems crash. Review platforms are unintuitive. XML editors have interfaces that resemble those built in the 1990s. Even when a journal invests in professional software, the learning curve is steep. Editors waste time wrestling with platforms instead of focusing on content.

Let’s take manuscript management systems (MMS) as an example. Platforms like ScholarOne, Editorial Manager, and OJS promise streamlined processes. But they require weeks of setup, customization, and troubleshooting. Many editors spend more time managing user accounts and resetting passwords than making editorial decisions. Worse still, software updates sometimes introduce new bugs instead of fixing old ones.

Then there’s AI. Everyone loves to talk about AI as the future of publishing. And yes, some tools are genuinely helpful. AI can assist with reviewer suggestions, flag plagiarism, or auto-generate keywords. But these systems are only as good as the data fed into them. Reviewer matching based on keyword overlap often overlooks domain-specific nuances. Plagiarism tools flag citations as copied text. And AI-generated abstracts, now increasingly common, further blur the line between human scholarship and machine-generated filler.

In some cases, tech dependence introduces new vulnerabilities. What happens when a journal’s site is hacked? Or a database crashes, wiping out submission history? Many small journals don’t have dedicated IT support. Backups are sporadic, security is patchy, and disaster recovery is a prayer rather than a plan.

The Human Cost: Burnout and Turnover

Journals are not machines. They are people—editors, reviewers, authors, proofreaders, and staff—each of whom has a breaking point. Editorial burnout is rampant. Some editors quietly disappear. Others hand over journals to successors who are not trained or invested. Turnover disrupts quality, delays publications, and weakens the journal’s institutional knowledge.

There’s also the thanklessness of the job. Editors rarely get public recognition, except when something goes wrong. Reviewers are invisible. Coordinators are overworked. And everyone is expected to operate at peak professionalism, even when the infrastructure is crumbling. It’s no wonder many talented people opt out after a few years. Running a journal is often a passion project. But passion alone doesn’t pay the bills, fix the workflow, or recruit a peer reviewer at midnight.

Burnout manifests in subtle ways. Decision letters become curt. Response times lengthen. Emails go unanswered. Deadlines slip. A journal that once took pride in its turnaround time of eight weeks suddenly takes six months. Authors notice. Reputation suffers. It becomes a vicious cycle. Poor workflows create stress, stress leads to burnout, burnout degrades quality, and degraded quality results in lower submissions.

Some editors cope by scaling down. They reduce the number of issues. They automate what they can. They delegate. But these are short-term solutions. Without institutional investment, editorial labor remains fragile. Journals need not only better tools but also better support systems, which include clear policies, mental health resources, and maybe even financial compensation.

What No One Tells You: Anecdotes from the Editorial Frontline

Sometimes, the best way to understand the chaos of running a journal is through the stories that never make it into formal reports. Like the time an editor received a submission that included comments accidentally left in the margin: “This data is shaky, should we just fake it?” The paper was otherwise convincing until those fateful words lit up like a neon sign of academic misconduct. After weeks of correspondence, the authors insisted it was an internal joke. The editor wasn’t laughing.

Or the journal that lost its managing editor during a university reorganization. No handover notes, no shared passwords, no documentation. For six months, no issues were published, emails went unanswered, and authors assumed the journal had died. It eventually recovered, but not before losing its indexing status and years of goodwill.

Then there’s the editor who discovered a systematic citation ring: authors from different institutions citing each other’s work across different journals to inflate impact scores artificially. It took months of investigation, coordination with other editors, and numerous back-channel emails before the network unraveled. No formal sanctions were imposed. The system simply absorbed the abuse and moved on.

And let’s not forget the technical meltdowns. One journal transitioned to a new submission system, only to discover after three months that the platform had a bug that redirected all submissions to a junk folder. Over 40 manuscripts vanished into digital purgatory. When discovered, authors were understandably furious. Some resubmitted. Others never came back.

These anecdotes aren’t outliers; they’re the norm. They paint a picture of academic publishing not as a sleek, precise engine, but as a bumpy, underfunded road paved with best intentions and frequent potholes. The people keeping it all together do so with tenacity and grace. But it’s a system that needs more than admiration. It needs reform.

Fixing the Machine: What Needs to Change

If running an academic journal is this difficult, what can be done? Plenty. But it requires a shift in mindset across the scholarly publishing ecosystem. First, we need to stop treating editorial labor as invisible or charitable. Editorial roles should be accompanied by recognition, institutional support, and, ideally, compensation. Editing a journal should count toward tenure and promotion—not be a side hustle that drains energy without academic reward.

Second, universities and funding agencies must invest in infrastructure. Journals hosted by institutions should have access to professional IT support, training workshops, and dedicated staff for layout, metadata, and archiving. No editor should have to Google “how to validate JATS XML” at midnight. Platforms like OJS should not only be funded but also professionally maintained and customized for ease of use.

Third, indexing databases need to be more transparent and accountable. If journals are to be evaluated by Scopus or Web of Science criteria, then those criteria must be communicated, consistently applied, and open to appeal. Journals shouldn’t be blindsided by delisting or punished for things beyond their control, like a dip in citation counts due to global events.

Fourth, we need to rethink peer review. Incentives matter. Platforms like Peer Community In and Review Commons are experimenting with alternative peer review models. Journals should consider offering badges, ORCID-linked recognition, or even honoraria for reviewers. At the very least, there should be a public acknowledgment of reviewer labor.

Finally, let’s embrace collaborative publishing. Journals don’t have to work in isolation. Shared copyediting pools, reviewer databases, open-source templates, and consortia-based funding models can help lighten the load. Some university presses are already banding together to offer technical support and shared infrastructure. More should follow suit.

Reform won’t happen overnight. But the current model is unsustainable. If we want journals to survive—and thrive—we need to treat them not as prestige projects or personal favors, but as the core public infrastructure of academic knowledge. That starts with giving editors and journal staff the credit, funding, and tools they deserve.

Looking Ahead: Is There a Future for Academic Journals?

Despite all the headaches, most editors will tell you that running a journal is also deeply fulfilling. There’s something profoundly meaningful about shaping the direction of a field, mentoring new scholars through the publication process, and curating a body of work that might be read decades from now. But the big question remains: are academic journals evolving fast enough to stay relevant?

In a world where preprints are gaining traction and knowledge dissemination is becoming increasingly decentralized, the traditional academic journal model is under scrutiny. Platforms like arXiv, SSRN, and bioRxiv enable researchers to share their work instantly, eliminating the need for peer review or publication cycles. Some predict that journals will become less about dissemination and more about certification, that is, verifying and curating the quality of what’s already public.

Others argue that journals must reinvent themselves entirely. What if peer review became open and collaborative? What if article formats included embedded data, videos, and real-time updates? What if editorial boards included technical specialists, not just academics, to ensure accessibility and reproducibility? These aren’t science fiction ideas. Pilot projects are already exploring them.

There’s also the AI question. In five years, will most papers be reviewed, copyedited, and typeset by machines? Possibly. But even then, humans will remain essential for judgment, ethics, and intellectual rigor. Editors won’t vanish, but their roles will likely shift from paper-pushers to curators, facilitators, and community leaders.

Ultimately, the survival of academic journals depends on the academic community’s willingness to adapt. That means questioning assumptions, abandoning broken models, and designing systems that are fair, efficient, and humane. We owe it not just to the editors and reviewers burning out quietly behind the scenes, but to the future of knowledge itself.

A Final Word from the Trenches

If this all sounds like too much, that’s because it often is. One anonymous editor, managing a regional open access journal in the humanities, summed it up perfectly: “Every issue feels like a miracle.” Between juggling classes, writing grant proposals, reviewing for other journals, and attending department meetings, they find time—usually late at night or on weekends—to read submissions, chase reviewers, and resolve technical glitches.

Their journal has survived on minimal funding, but what keeps it alive is the community. Local scholars pitch in to review. Graduate students help with typesetting. A retired professor volunteers as a language editor. There’s no profit, no prestige, no external praise. Just a shared belief in the importance of the work. “We’re the last line of defense,” the editor said. “If we stop, the whole scaffolding of slow, careful scholarship collapses.”

That line sticks. Because, despite its flaws, the academic journal still serves a vital purpose. It remains one of the few spaces where ideas are vetted, refined, and preserved with rigor. Fixing the system doesn’t mean discarding it. It means honoring the labor behind it and making that labor more sustainable. The headache is real, but so is the hope.

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