It’s all too easy to imagine that electronic publications cost next to nothing to make. After all, there’s no physical product being created. No materials are consumed; nobody’s performing any manual labor. And anyway, everything online is free…right?
Well, you already know that’s not really true. But it isn’t just that online publishing is “not free”. For the publisher, it’s actually the most costly part of the business.
Work as a cost #
Here’s something that many in the scholarly community often seem to forget: the work of online publishing is work. It takes time, energy, and effort. And that labor — whether your labor alone, or that of your staff, volunteers, or assistants — has value, which should not be discounted. It is a finite resource that you are choosing to put into your endeavor. It is a cost.
It might seem overly philosophical to argue that these “costs” (especially if volunteered) belong in the same bucket as the actual dollars you’ll need to spend. But we think that too many go in the opposite direction, dismissing the work and time involved as “free” and, therefore, unimportant. This does you, and other journal publishers, a serious disservice. Your new journal can’t survive without the time and effort you put into it — time and effort you spend on it, when you could have spent it someplace else entirely. And in order to realistically plan for your journal’s future, you need to take these costs into account.
And philosophy aside, there’s a practical point here for the new journal publisher: sooner or later, you may decide that you would prefer to pay others for their labor, rather than doing everything yourself or relying on the largesse of volunteers. If and when that time comes, it’ll be important for you to truly grasp the value of what you’re paying for. Otherwise, you may be surprised to find that your needs surpass your budget.
The publisher’s (abbreviated) task list #
To illustrate this point, here are some examples of how you — or your team — will need to spend your time and energy, and why you should make sure they’re within your means.
Making and maintaining your website #
We’ll start with an obvious one: as an online publication, you need to have an online home. If you’re backed by a university, you may have access to their website-hosting services; but even so, you’ll likely need to set up the journal pages yourself, making sure they appropriately display your journal’s ISSN, its policies, and other information for your readers and authors.
You’ll also, of course, need to periodically add articles and issues to the site; and as things change — as your editorial board turns over, or as the number of expected issues per year increases — you’ll need to keep things up-to-date. This isn’t just an up-front cost; it’s an ongoing one.
Developing policies #
We just mentioned that you’ll need to put your policies on your website. In order to do that, you must know what your policies are. Depending on how your journal operates, you may delegate some part of the actual policy-writing to your editorial board; but generally speaking, the publisher is the party responsible for making sure final versions are communicated to readers. Necessary policies include, but are not limited to: descriptions of the peer-review process; “authorship” definitions; copyright and licensing terms; conflict-of-interest policies; and policies around plagiarism or other kinds of misconduct.
Omitting these policies won’t merely open you up to confusion from authors. It can also limit the stature that your journal is able to achieve. Most notably: the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), a significant (if somewhat controversial) marker of prestige for an academic journal, is only assigned to journals accepted to the Web of Science Core Collection; and the Web of Science will only accept journals that adhere to certain requirements…among them, the presence of certain statements and policies on the journal’s website. No misconduct policy? No impact factor. And the Web of Science isn’t the only resource that looks for these policies, either. So, if you want your journal to be included in the major research hubs, ranked in the Journal Citation Reports, and generally taken seriously, these are important i’s and t’s to dot and cross.
Copyediting and typesetting #
This is the labor that goes into turning a peer-reviewed and accepted article into professionally produced content. Everyone makes typos now and again, but no serious publisher should be happy to allow them into a finished product. Moreover, a publisher who truly cares about their product will go further than merely correcting obvious errors: a good typesetter with an eye for aesthetics can significantly improve a work’s readability. This is especially true for mathematics and other disciplines with diagrams, graphs, and other figures. But no matter the discipline, some minimal amount of human attention is required simply to make sure that tables don’t overspill the margins, that authors, affiliated institutions, and funders are correctly identified, and that the final version looks clean and polished. You need to ensure this work happens.
Metadata management #
Nearly as important as the information presented in your journal is the information about the information presented in your journal. Metadata is the link that directs researchers from a citation in a bibliography (or an entry in a research database) back to the PDF on your website — or not, if you haven’t done your homework. Does each of your articles have its own identifier? Does your publication? Have you uniquely identified your contributors? Who funded their research? What topics are related to this work? As the publisher, it’s your job to compile, assign, and communicate all of this information — and much more.
And of course, metadata needs and standards are subject to change. Not only does the research community itself regularly evaluate and attempt to improve metadata best practices, but private companies like Google and ResearchGate frequently adjust the way their software interacts with online content. To take proper advantage of the tools available, you’ll need to keep up to date with the latest requirements as they come into use.
Accounting for everything #
This list isn’t comprehensive. We haven’t even gone into setting up a production workflow, nor any of the work involved if you’re selling subscriptions or restricting access.
But here’s what we hope we’ve demonstrated: the time spent managing a journal is valuable. Your work, your attention, and your energy are valuable. These are “costs” worth budgeting for just as carefully as fungible currency. (Indeed, at a large publishing company, there would be a budget for labor costs, and it would be expressed as currency!)
Whether you budget out of your own reserve, or out of that of a cohort of helpers, is up to you (and a subject for another time). But don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because something is invisible, it’s unimportant — or inexpensive. And when you think about how much it will cost to run your journal, make sure you’re taking all your expenditures into account.
Further reading #
M. Sayab,
“Diamond Dreams, Unequal Realities: The Promise and Pitfalls of No-APC Open Access”, The Scholarly Kitchen post, 2025: A look at the disconnect between the goal of making research freely available, and the realities of needing to pay for its publication.
K. Anderson,
“Focusing on Value — 102 Things Journal Publishers Do (2018 Update)”, The Scholarly Kitchen post, 2018: A list of duties fulfilled by publishers that is far closer to complete than the one we’ve presented here.
Header image by Towfiqu barbhuiya, available from Unsplash. Free to use under the Unsplash license.