Every journal these days needs an online application for the management of the journal works. In the previous decades, this was done by post and then it returned to email. But now an academic journal needs such a system to be able to remain in this arena. As of now, the authors would not send their papers to the journals by email or post. So, journal managers should think about this issue in the first days of launching new journals.
Many journals are managed by commercial publishers, or universities, these organizations always have already outsourced this job to an external technology company that is offering such a service. But, there are still some organizations and associations that do not offer such a service or their choice option is not suitable for the journal founders. Also, many journals are launching by private or independent scholars that does not have such a option and should decide about it on their own.
How to select an online journal management system for a new journal
Aforementioned, these systems are of two types open source and commercials. The commercial systems are sold and supported by companies based on subscriptions and are supported and updated regularly. But their prices vary from very low to thousands of USD per year. It depends on the system and the add-ons that be purchased. As while it seems simple, a review of the current paradigms in journal management, reveals that theses systems are much more complicated than it seems.
What is behind an online journal management system?
The journal management systems are not now systems just to receive the manuscripts from the authors and pass them to the reviewers, they are much more than it. These systems now are constructed on a complicated infrastructure that links the publications of each journal to the archives, coding and identifying systems that are defined for the digital objects, the authors, and the organizations behind them. For example ScholarOne is one the famous web applications hosted by Clarivate institute, the owner of WoS Archive. Reviewing the services linked to the ScholarOne system reveals how much the extent of parralel systems for indexing, measuring the impact of publications, the indicators of the academic organizations, the scientific indicators of the scholars, and connections between the archives are vast and multiple.