Every journal has a unique name in the world of journals that includes a full name and a short name. These names both should be unique and individual. Besides, every journal should have a clearly described scope. Te scope of a journal should include a clear description of the subjects that a journal will accept manuscripts about them. Having a strict scope for the journal and respecting it in the process of publishing is very important and is a key to entering the archives.

Introduce the team of the journal

The team of a journal is the employees who will work for the journal. The journal manager may hire these individuals or may be employees of companies like DoNotEdit, which work remotely for the journal. These individuals, whose roles are described below, will manage the journal’s affairs and should be trained for their respective roles. The selection of these members is crucial, as journal management is primarily an intellectual activity that requires deep attention, commitment, and passion to be performed effectively.

Find a publisher or funding source.

The main issue in journal management in the first years is financial issues. So, finding a publisher or investor is strongly recommended. It is not accurate to try to manage the journal with its budget. As this makes journal management risky, instability in access to funds makes the journal process fragile and irregular, and irregularity and inconsistency in journal management are crucial.

The publisher of a journal might be a company like DoNotEdit, which is a publisher of academic journals, or it might be an educational institution, a relevant scientific association, a charity, a hospital, a clinic, or a governmental institution.

Who are the prominent members of a Journal team

The main people you should have in a journal are the editor-in-chief, the associate editor, the technical editor, the editorial board members, the team of editors and designers, the website specialists, and the public relations or social media expert. Some of these duties and positions may be mixed or outsourced to companies like DoNotEdit, but the editor-in-chief and the editorial board should be distinct, although a scholar can hold such roles at multiple journals simultaneously.

Launch the Journal website.

The first encounter of the authors is with the journal website, and this is very important to have an appropriate website for the journal. There are software applications designed for managing online journals. These applications, like OJS, are commonly offered by companies like DoNotEdit and should be outsourced, as the journal team can not individually launch them.

Applying for a domain name and hosting is essential for the journal management system to run smoothly and be accessible to authors and readers.

Send the first call for papers

The call for papers is the main activity of the journals for receiving submissions. The call for papers is commonly announced via email, advertisements on websites, or posters, and is the primary method for inviting other scholars to submit their new research manuscripts to your journal. It even sometimes needs to pay for ads and apply email marketing methods to reach the proper audience that would submit. The submission rate has a direct and significant relationship with the journal’s indexing and impact factor. In the early days of journal life, when indexing was poor and there was no impact factor, it was challenging to attract authors and receive high-quality submissions. Subsequently, the level or quality of the articles in the journal establishes its future growth.

Publish the first issue

As soon as you have 8 manuscripts, you can publish Volume One, Issue One. It is not a very difficult job for an editor-in-chief who has substantial communication with colleagues. You should collect a list of colleagues and send them emails about your new journal and ask them to give one of their unpublished papers. Every researcher these days has multiple papers on their computer that are never published. Some of them might be incomplete or need some revisions. In this step, the editors should close their eyes and accept the papers without great and jaw-dropping ideas, although they should not neglect the ethical and methodological issues, even at this step because the discipline of the journal should be coherent and strict.

A method for finding submissions in this step is to review the archives of unpublished papers, such as MedArchiv. Also, you might perform a search in proposal registries like Clinicaltrial.gov and ask the principal authors of the recently finalized proposals to send their reports to your journal. Especially the projects with negative or no findings.

Apply for ISSN

After publishing the first volume, you might apply for an ISSN. This is a local activity and each country has a council for the ISSN registry of its own citizens. This council is commonly the one used for registering new books. You might due to some reasons want to apply for ISSN from another country. It is a little bit more difficult and might need to contact an agency like DoNotEdit, which is an expert in this issue. The list of ISSN registrars of countries can be found on the official ISSN.org website.

Try to develop the network

At this stage, the primary objective is to establish a network of authors and reviewers for the journal. Without a working group that links the authors, experts in the journal’s subject field, and the reviewers, who are researchers with the same subject matter interest. Without this link, no journal can survive. So, any journal might try to open accounts in social media networks, contact colleagues on the same subject matter by email and phone, participate in the relevant congresses and meetings, and other events. The editors should develop their network of scholars who might submit papers for their new journal or contact companies like DoNotEdit with an extensive network of scholars in various subject fields to expand their trustworthiness among scholars.

Apply for low to moderate-level archives

After publishing one or two issues, you might apply to many archiving databases of scientific journals. There are numerous archives that enable the submission of a new journal to be completed quickly and efficiently (e.g., Google Scholar, DOAJ, and Index Copernicus). These archives are not very high ranked, but the new journals become visible and

Publish regularly

One of the crucial issues in journal publishing is regular publication, so you should establish an archive of accepted articles to be able to publish regularly and on time. Otherwise, after one or two issues, you will find no acceptable manuscripts to publish.

It is even suggested to try to collect some manuscripts prior to launching the first issues. It will ensure that, during the challenging first weeks and months, you will not run out of paper.

Publishing on time is one of the key issues to be respected and followed throughout the life of a journal, from its inception. Reviewing many journals, you might see that the first issues are not published regularly. The fact is that any problem that is outdated or has a low number is not considered appropriate by the central archives, and the journal will earn negative points.

Be active on Social media

Being active in social media, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and ResearchGate, is very important for journals as it makes them a social entity that can be visited, debated ,and challenged by the scholars of the same field. In this situation, the journal becomes viable and will be considered active by the scholar, and they will be attracted to interact with the journal. It is crucial that the audience of a journal is not just those who submit, but also they are those who

Apply for Scopus as soon as you have published four issues

As soon as you have published four issues with 40 papers, you can apply for Scopus indexing. This is a step towards achieving the journal rankings and identifying a ranking score within the Scopus database’s journal ranking system, which is accessible here. But it is not the case, as you should obtain almost all criteria that Scopus asks the journals to be listed and ranked, and if not, you might face a lag time of six months up to four years as a penalty or break time to reach the criteria of this archive.

Apply for COPE

Ethical considerations are crucial for current journals, particularly in the fields of health and medicine. So, the moral considerations should be respected in the accepted articles. These considerations are at the two main sections, the first respecting the ethical regulations in the research project, and the second regarding the scientific report of it that is submitted to the journal. This research project should have a valid ethical code, a clinical trial registry code (if applicable), and should have obtained informed consent from the patients or participants. The study should have respected animal protection laws if it had involved animal subjects.

Besides, there are four research reports that should be respected, these include the plagiarism issues and other research frauds that are listed on the COPE website for scientific reporting. Both types of ethical issues should be presented in the website of the journal and it is essential that these webpages be written professionally and this is another service that DoNotEdit would help the new journal editors to do it.

Finally, applying the COPE guidelines for ethical considerations is very important, and it can be done by outsourcing to companies like DoNotEdit as well. The detail about how a journal can be approved by COPE is listed in the website of this group and also it is important to ensure the authors that these rules will be remained unchanged.

Try to improve your journal citations

The core point for improvement of a journal is the citation of its publications by other journals. So it is one of the most important issues for journals to cite other journals in their articles. The fact is that the papers are cited by other authors when their findings are valuable. However, naturally, journals with higher impact or better indexing and archives are more visible, and with the same level of content, they have a higher chance of receiving citations. So, in the early years of a journal, its team should try to attract the other authors’ attention to their journal and ask for citations more actively.

Take-home message

Opening a medical journal is a problematic but delicious activity that takes several years to be fully developed and reach to stability and income. But, it will bring reputation and successful communications for the journal owners, which is worth it. However, it should not be forgotten that this work must be performed in accordance with the standards and regulations; otherwise, the team’s efforts will be ineffective, and numerous journals have expired after a few months or years due to misconceptions, mismanagement, and poor communication.