Home / Services / Launch your journal
A department, a society or a research group with a journal in mind - or a journal already running on email and goodwill. We set it up on the platform, register its identifiers, put a real editorial workflow behind it, and get it to the point where an author can submit and a reader can cite.
Who this is for
All three end in the same place: a journal that behaves like a journal, on infrastructure that does not depend on one person's laptop.
You have the scope, the editors and the community, and nothing else yet. We start at the title and the ISSN application and work forward.
It exists, it publishes, and the process lives in inboxes and shared folders. We move it onto a workflow with an audit trail, without losing the back issues.
You want out of a system that is too expensive, too rigid, or going away. We migrate the archive, the metadata and the DOIs.
Your proceedings are strong enough to justify a journal alongside them. The same editorial team, the same platform, one shared record.
What the service covers
The parts that are tedious to do once and impossible to do well in a hurry.
We work through the scope with you until it is narrow enough to be reviewable and broad enough to fill an issue. A scope that says "all areas of engineering" is the first thing an indexer reads as a warning sign.
Guidance through the ISSN application for print and online, and article DOIs registered through Technology Fist's Crossref membership and prefix, so every article gets a permanent, resolvable identifier.
Editor-in-Chief, handling editors, reviewers - set up with the right permissions on the platform, and named publicly on the journal page. We can help you recruit through our information for editors page.
Peer-review model, authorship, ethics, corrections and retractions, licensing and fee disclosure - drafted against COPE principles and our published Rule Book, not written from scratch every time.
Submission form, single or double-blind review, revision rounds, decision letters and camera-ready collection - configured to how your journal actually works rather than a fixed template.
Disclosed in advance, waivable at your discretion, and recorded against the paper. If you charge nothing, the journal simply never shows a fee.
Cover, aims and scope, editorial board, instructions for authors, ISSNs, publishing model, and the archive — with permanent article pages served as full-text HTML, PDF and JATS XML, carrying complete metadata and citation exports.
Existing volumes, articles, authors and any DOIs you already hold, brought across and checked. Your archive is the thing you cannot rebuild, so we treat it that way.
How it runs
Publishing on this platform is not switched on by paying for it. An application is reviewed by subject specialists before a venue can publish - which is exactly what makes the journals here worth being in.
Scope, community, who the editors are, and what already exists. Free, and sometimes it ends with us saying not yet.
You apply to publish, describing the journal, its editorial team and its review process.
Subject specialists in your field assess the application and recommend approval, conditions or refusal.
Terms, licensing and responsibilities in writing before any content moves.
Workspace configured, policies loaded, identifiers registered, back issues imported and checked.
The call goes out, the workflow runs, and the first issue publishes with DOIs registered.
Straight answers
Every one of these is something a publisher could imply and then quietly not deliver. We would rather lose the enquiry than have the argument later.
"A journal is set up once and lives for decades. The hour spent narrowing its scope is worth more than the year spent trying to widen its reputation afterwards."
How we approach a launchJournal hosting runs on a plan - the platform, the workflow and the publishing module are the same for everyone, and the pricing page sets those out. The launch work itself is quoted per journal, because migrating four decades of back issues and starting a journal that has no back issues are not the same job. Tell us which you are and we will quote it before you commit to anything.
How this is billed. This work is quoted in advance and invoiced directly by us. It is not sold through the card checkout, which handles annual AMS licences and per-paper publication processing only.
Scope, who is behind it, and whether anything exists already. We will tell you what it would take - including if the honest answer is that it is not ready yet.