Plan S, the open access mandate launched by cOAlition S in 2018, has moved from a policy aspiration to a publishing reality. As of 2025, funders representing billions in annual research spend require that any work they fund is immediately, freely, and openly available. For journal editors, this is no longer a niche concern: it shapes submission volumes, author expectations, licensing decisions, and long-term journal viability.

What Is Plan S?

Plan S requires that peer-reviewed publications arising from research funded by participating organisations are made available in open access form from the date of publication with no embargo period. The initiative is backed by major funders including the European Research Council, Wellcome Trust, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and a growing number of national funding bodies across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

The three compliant routes under Plan S are: publishing in a fully open access journal (Gold OA), publishing in a journal that offers a compliant open access option (Hybrid OA with a transformative agreement), or depositing the author accepted manuscript in an open repository with immediate open access (Green OA with no embargo).

The Rights Retention Strategy

One of the most consequential developments of recent years is the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), now adopted by UKRI, Wellcome, and the Gates Foundation among others. Under the RRS, authors apply a CC BY licence to their accepted manuscript at the point of submission, before any copyright transfer agreement with the publisher takes effect. This means that even if the final published version is behind a paywall, the author retains the right to post their accepted manuscript openly and immediately.

For editors, this has a direct implication: you may begin receiving manuscripts with an RRS statement attached. These cannot be rejected on the basis of the licence alone. Journals that have not updated their submission and licensing workflows to accommodate this will face growing friction with authors from RRS-adopting institutions.

What Editors Must Do Now

First, audit your journal's licence options. Does your journal offer CC BY as a standard option? Does it support immediate open access? If you operate a subscription or hybrid model, do you have a transformative agreement with a cOAlition S funder? If the answer to all three is no, a significant and growing pool of authors will be unable to publish in your journal without violating their funding conditions.

Second, update your author guidelines explicitly. State which Plan S routes your journal supports. Authors, particularly early career researchers, are often confused about compliance and will look to the journal's guidance first. Clear, specific information reduces back-and-forth at the submission and acceptance stages.

Third, review your embargo policies. Any embargo on green open access longer than zero is non-compliant with Plan S. If your journal has historically relied on twelve or twenty-four month embargoes to protect subscription revenue, that model is under sustained pressure.

Article Processing Charges and Equity

A persistent criticism of Gold OA under Plan S is that Article Processing Charges (APCs) create a new paywall, one on the author side rather than the reader side. Funders have responded by requiring that APCs be capped and that waivers be available for researchers in low- and middle-income countries. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) maintains a list of journals with APC transparency; listing there is increasingly a baseline expectation.

Diamond open access, where neither authors nor readers pay, is increasingly seen as the most equitable model and is receiving dedicated infrastructure investment in Europe and Latin America. For journals affiliated with learned societies or universities, this model deserves serious consideration.

The Bottom Line for Editors

Plan S is not going away, and its reach is expanding. The editors who will navigate this period successfully are those who treat OA compliance as an editorial infrastructure question, not a marketing one. That means updating workflows, licensing terms, and author guidance proactively, rather than reactively when authors raise compliance conflicts at the point of acceptance.

Peer review is the cornerstone of scientific publishing, and yet most reviewers receive no formal training in how to do it well. The result is a wide spectrum of review quality: from detailed, constructive reports that genuinely improve a manuscript, to vague, dismissive responses that frustrate authors and leave editors with nothing to work with.

Before You Agree to Review

The first decision is whether to accept the invitation at all. Ask yourself: Is this manuscript within my area of genuine expertise? Do I have a conflict of interest with any of the authors? Can I deliver a thorough review within the requested timeframe? If the answer to any of these is uncertain, communicate that to the editor immediately. A late or under-qualified review causes more harm to the process than a prompt decline.

Reading the Manuscript: Two Passes

On your first read, resist the urge to take notes. Read the paper as a whole to understand what it is trying to do, how it approaches that goal, and whether it broadly succeeds. Form an overall impression before you start critiquing details. This matters because many reviewers get lost in minor issues while missing more fundamental problems, or conversely reject papers on methodological details while overlooking a genuinely novel contribution.

On the second read, go carefully through each section with your notepad open. For the introduction: Is the research question clearly stated? Is the literature review current and relevant? For the methods: Are they described in sufficient detail for replication? For the results: Is the statistical analysis appropriate and correctly interpreted? For the discussion: Are the claims supported by the data? Are limitations honestly acknowledged?

Structuring Your Report

A well-structured review has three parts: a summary, major concerns, and minor concerns. The summary (two to four sentences) demonstrates that you have understood the paper. Major concerns are issues that would, if unresolved, justify rejection or major revision. Number each concern and be specific. Minor concerns cover clarity, presentation, and detail. These should not be the focus of the review, but they are worth noting if they affect comprehension.

Tone: Constructive, Not Adversarial

Your job as a reviewer is not to find reasons to reject a paper, it is to help the authors produce the best possible version of their work, and to give the editor the information they need to make a sound decision. Reviews that are dismissive or personalised damage the author's confidence without improving the science. Write as you would want someone to write about your own work. Equally, avoid the opposite extreme: reviews that are uniformly positive and uncritical do not serve the scientific record.

What to Put in Your Confidential Comments to the Editor

This section is your private recommendation and any concerns you cannot raise openly, for example a suspected overlap with a paper you reviewed elsewhere, or a concern about data integrity. Your recommendation (Accept, Minor Revision, Major Revision, Reject) should be stated clearly and briefly justified.

After You Submit

If the paper comes back for a second round, review the authors' response letter carefully before re-reading the manuscript. Authors are entitled to disagree with your comments; what matters is whether they have engaged with them substantively. If they have provided a convincing response to a concern you raised, update your position accordingly. Peer review is a service to the scientific community. Done well, it is one of the most valuable contributions a researcher can make.

Artificial intelligence entered scientific publishing not with a policy announcement, but with a flood of manuscripts. Within months of large language models becoming publicly accessible, editorial offices were receiving papers that bore the unmistakable fingerprint of AI-generated prose. The publishing industry has spent the intervening period trying to catch up, with varying degrees of success. In 2025, the question is no longer whether AI will affect publishing, it already has, but how editors, publishers, and institutions should govern its use to protect the integrity of the scientific record.

Where AI Is Being Used in the Workflow

At the clearly beneficial end: AI-assisted grammar and language editing, automated plagiarism and overlap detection, reference management and formatting, figure quality checking, and statistical analysis software. These tools have been part of the workflow for years and raise few new ethical questions.

More recently, researchers are using large language models to help structure literature reviews, generate first-draft methods sections, improve the clarity of non-native English writing, and respond to reviewer comments. These uses are widespread and are not, in themselves, misconduct, but they require disclosure, and they require the author to take full responsibility for the accuracy of everything the AI generates.

At the problematic end: using AI to generate results, fabricate references, produce data, or write entire papers without meaningful intellectual contribution from a named human author. These practices are old forms of misconduct (fabrication, plagiarism, ghost authorship) in a new guise, and they should be treated accordingly.

The Authorship Question

Every major publishing ethics body including COPE, ICMJE, the Royal Society, and Nature Portfolio has now issued guidance stating that AI systems cannot be named as authors. Authorship requires accountability: the ability to take responsibility for the work, respond to post-publication queries, and be identified as having made an intellectual contribution. AI systems cannot do any of these things. What remains genuinely contested is the threshold of AI use that requires disclosure, and the form that disclosure should take.

Detection: Useful but Not Reliable

AI detection tools produce probabilistic scores, not verdicts. They have documented false positive rates, particularly for writing by non-native English speakers, whose prose patterns sometimes resemble AI output. Using a detection score as grounds for rejection without further investigation is not defensible editorial practice and has led to documented cases of wrongful rejection. Detection tools are best used as a signal to investigate further, not as an automated gate.

Peer Review and AI

Several high-profile cases have emerged of reviewers pasting manuscripts directly into ChatGPT and submitting the output as their review, a breach of confidentiality and of intellectual rigour. Most journal policies now explicitly prohibit this practice, but enforcement is almost impossible. What editors can do is make the prohibition explicit in reviewer invitations and guidelines, and remain alert to the signs of AI-generated reviews: generic praise or criticism that could apply to almost any paper, and absence of specific engagement with the manuscript's methods or data.

What Editors Should Do Now

Adopt an AI disclosure policy and communicate it clearly. Update your reviewer guidelines to address AI use explicitly. Resist the pressure to treat AI detection scores as editorial decisions. Engage with the ongoing policy development at COPE and ICMJE. The journals that navigate this period well will be those that treat AI not as a threat to be defeated, but as a capability to be governed, with the same seriousness and consistency that they bring to authorship, conflict of interest, and data integrity.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was founded in 1997 by a group of medical journal editors who found themselves facing similar ethical dilemmas with no shared framework to guide their decisions. Today, COPE is the global standard-setter for publication ethics, with over 12,000 member journals across every academic discipline. Its flowcharts, guidelines, and case discussions form the backbone of how well-run journals handle the situations that editors dread most.

The COPE Flowcharts

The most immediately useful COPE resource for working editors is the set of flowcharts, step-by-step decision trees for specific situations. There are flowcharts covering suspected fabricated data, suspected plagiarism, authorship disputes, undisclosed conflicts of interest, redundant publication, suspected reviewer misconduct, and post-publication concerns, among others. These flowcharts do not make decisions for you. They ensure you ask the right questions in the right order, gather the necessary information, and involve the right parties before reaching a conclusion.

Authorship and Contributorship

Authorship disputes are among the most common and most difficult issues editors face. COPE's guidance aligns with ICMJE criteria, which require that each author has made a substantial contribution to conception or design, or data acquisition, analysis, or interpretation; drafted or critically revised the work; approved the final version; and agrees to be accountable for the work. All four criteria must be met. Guest authorship (adding a senior name who made no contribution) and ghost authorship (excluding someone who made a genuine contribution) are both forms of misconduct under these criteria.

Handling Suspected Plagiarism

Plagiarism ranges from wholesale copying to inappropriate paraphrasing to self-plagiarism. COPE's approach is to first contact the authors for an explanation before reaching a conclusion. Minor unattributed text overlap, especially in methods sections, may be inadvertent. Extensive verbatim copying of another author's work is a different matter. If confirmed plagiarism is found pre-publication, the manuscript should be rejected. If found post-publication, a retraction may be necessary.

Retractions and Corrections

COPE's Retraction Guidelines state that retraction is appropriate when findings are unreliable due to misconduct or honest error, when the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper acknowledgement, or when the work constitutes plagiarism or reports unethical research. A retraction notice must clearly state the reason for retraction and be freely available to all readers. The original article should not be removed from the published record; it should be clearly marked as retracted. This principle of non-erasure is central to the integrity of the scientific record.

Conflicts of Interest

COPE requires that journals have a clear, published policy on conflict of interest disclosure for authors, reviewers, and editors. All financial relationships relevant to the submitted work must be disclosed. Editors should not handle manuscripts in which they have a conflict of interest. If an editor-in-chief is a co-author, the manuscript should be handled by another editor with no access to the editorial record for that submission.

Becoming a COPE Member

COPE membership is available to individual journals and to publishers. Members gain access to the full case library, training resources, and the COPE forum. Membership also signals to indexing bodies, authors, and funders that the journal is committed to ethical practice. For journals beginning their ethics journey, COPE's Core Practices document is the best starting point.

Academic journals have historically relied on library subscriptions, database indexing, and word-of-mouth among researchers to drive readership. These channels remain important, but they no longer tell the whole story. A growing body of evidence shows that social media is now a significant driver of article discovery, citation, and author submission decisions. Journals that have not yet built a coherent social media presence are leaving a meaningful visibility gap that competing publications are filling.

Which Platforms to Prioritise

For most STEM journals, the two platforms that deliver the highest return on editorial investment are X/Twitter and LinkedIn. X/Twitter remains the primary real-time conversation platform for researchers, particularly in life sciences, physics, and computer science. LinkedIn has matured significantly as an academic platform and now reaches a broader audience including early career researchers, institutional administrators, and industry professionals who do not use X/Twitter. Do not spread your effort across all platforms. Start with X/Twitter and LinkedIn, do them well, and expand only when you have capacity.

What to Post: Five Content Types That Perform

Plain text links to new articles perform poorly on almost every platform. What performs well is content that gives the audience something directly. Article highlights work best when you extract a single striking finding and present it as a standalone insight. Visual content, including graphical abstracts, key figures, and data visualisations, consistently outperforms text-only posts. Author spotlights and behind-the-paper threads give a human face to published research and consistently generate higher engagement than any other content type across academic audiences. Call for papers reach potential submitters effectively on both platforms. Engagement with your research community builds the kind of reciprocal relationship that converts followers into authors.

The Editorial Board as a Multiplier

The single highest-leverage action a journal can take on social media is to activate its editorial board. A paper shared by fifteen editorial board members with an average of 2,000 followers each reaches a potential audience of 30,000, with the added credibility of expert endorsement. Most editorial board members are willing to share journal content; they simply are not asked in a format that makes it easy. A monthly email with pre-written, copy-paste-ready social posts removes the friction entirely.

Consistency Over Volume

The most common mistake journals make on social media is posting intensively for a few months after launch, then going quiet as editorial workload takes over. An account that posts three times a week, every week, for two years will dramatically outperform an account that posts fifteen times a week for three months and then falls silent. For most journal social media accounts, three to five posts per week is the sweet spot.

Measuring What Matters

Follower count is a vanity metric. What matters for journals is article discoverability and submission intent. The indicators worth tracking are link clicks from social posts, article download spikes correlating with social promotion dates, and, over longer time horizons, submission source data from your manuscript management system. Many authors now list social media as a discovery channel when asked how they found the journal.

There is a persistent myth in academic publishing that language editing is a final polish, something that happens at the end of the process, once the science has been assessed and found sound. In practice, the opposite is often true. Reviewers and editors form a rapid impression of a manuscript's quality within the first two pages, and poor language is one of the fastest ways to generate a negative impression that is difficult to reverse, regardless of the underlying scientific merit.

This matters most for researchers who do not write in their first language, which is to say, the majority of the global scientific community. English is the working language of international scientific publishing, but fewer than a quarter of the world's researchers are native English speakers.

What Editors Actually Do When They Read a Manuscript

Editors-in-chief of high-volume journals routinely make desk rejection decisions, declining manuscripts before they enter peer review, based on a rapid initial assessment. Across disciplines, language quality is consistently cited as one of the top three reasons for desk rejection, alongside insufficient novelty and poor methodological fit. A manuscript that requires extensive language revision creates significant additional work for reviewers who are volunteering their time, and may need to return to the authors for another revision cycle before the language is clear enough to assess the science accurately.

The Difference Between Proofreading and Scientific English Editing

Proofreading corrects spelling errors, punctuation, and obvious grammatical mistakes. It does not address the deeper issues that affect the clarity and credibility of scientific writing: sentence structure that obscures causality, passive voice used inappropriately, hedging language that makes findings sound less significant than they are, inconsistent use of technical terminology, or transitions that fail to connect argument sections coherently. Scientific English editing, done well, requires an editor who understands the conventions of the specific discipline.

When in the Workflow Should Language Editing Happen?

The most effective point for language editing is immediately before submission, after the manuscript has been through internal review by co-authors but before it is sent to the journal. Editing at this stage means the manuscript is as complete as possible and the language editor can work on a stable document. Editing after peer review (revise and resubmit) is also valuable, particularly when reviewers have raised clarity concerns.

The Citation Impact of Language Quality

Several bibliometric studies have examined the relationship between writing quality and citation rates, controlling for journal prestige and research topic. The findings are consistent: papers with higher readability scores receive more citations on average. The likely mechanism is that clearly written papers are more easily understood, more easily shared, and more readily built upon. For researchers from non-English-speaking institutions competing for attention in high-impact journals, language editing is one of the most cost-effective investments they can make in the visibility and longevity of their work.

For most academic journals, indexing in Scopus or Web of Science (WoS) is the most sought-after quality signal in publishing. Indexed journals attract higher-quality submissions, are recognised by university promotion committees and funding bodies worldwide, and are significantly more discoverable to the global research community. The process of achieving indexing is demanding, but it is navigable if approached systematically.

Understanding What Evaluators Are Looking For

Both Scopus (operated by Elsevier) and Web of Science (operated by Clarivate) use expert panels to evaluate journal applications. These panels are looking for evidence of sustained editorial quality, not promises of future improvement. This is the single most important thing to understand: you cannot apply your way into indexing. You publish your way into indexing, and then you apply. Both databases evaluate journals on broadly similar criteria: peer review quality and transparency, editorial board composition and expertise, publication regularity and timeliness, ethical standards, citation profile, author and editor geographic diversity, and online presence and accessibility.

Scopus: Eligibility and Application

To be eligible for Scopus evaluation, a journal must have been publishing peer-reviewed content for a minimum of two years, must have an ISSN, must publish in or include English abstracts, must have a publicly accessible website with a clear scope, editorial board, and peer review policy, and must demonstrate a consistent publication schedule. The application is submitted through the Scopus Source Submission portal. The evaluation timeline is typically six to twelve months. Rejected journals must wait twelve months before reapplying.

Web of Science: The Emerging Sources Citation Index

Web of Science operates a tiered system. The Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) is the entry point: a journal that meets basic quality criteria can be accepted into ESCI, where it begins accumulating citation data. After sufficient time in ESCI, typically two to three years, journals with strong citation profiles become eligible for evaluation for the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), or Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). ESCI acceptance is a meaningful quality signal in its own right and is recognised by many national research evaluation frameworks.

The Practical Checklist

Editorial board: Your board should include recognised experts from multiple countries and institutions. A board that consists entirely of colleagues from one institution in one country is a red flag for evaluators. Peer review transparency: Your website must clearly explain your peer review model, your expected review timeline, and your policy on reviewer selection and conflict of interest. Publication regularity: Issue publication dates must match the dates stated in your journal's schedule. Ethical policies: Your website should have clearly published policies on authorship, plagiarism, conflict of interest, and data availability. COPE membership is a positive signal. Digital presence: Each article should have a DOI registered through CrossRef. Metadata should be complete and machine-readable.

Common Rejection Reasons

Too narrow a scope or too small an author pool: Evaluators look for evidence that the journal serves a genuinely global research community. Insufficient citation data: Journals cannot be evaluated for impact if they have not been publishing long enough to accumulate citations. Weak editorial board: Board members who are not publishing actively in the field, or who are all from the same institution, weaken the application significantly. Website deficiencies: Missing or outdated scope statements, absent peer review policies, and incomplete editorial board pages are fixable problems that no journal should allow to persist.

Open access (OA) publishing has moved from a fringe movement to the dominant policy direction in global scientific publishing. Funder mandates, national policies, and the simple reality that research hidden behind paywalls is less used, less cited, and less impactful have combined to make OA not a question of if but how. For journal editors and publishers in 2025, understanding the landscape is a baseline professional requirement.

The Four OA Models

Gold open access means the final published version of the article is immediately freely available under an open licence, typically CC BY. The journal is either fully OA or a hybrid journal that offers OA as a paid option. Green open access means the author self-archives a version of their manuscript in an institutional or subject repository. Green OA often involves an embargo period, though funder mandates are increasingly requiring zero-embargo green OA. Diamond open access refers to fully OA journals where neither authors nor readers pay, with costs covered by institutions, learned societies, or government grants. Bronze open access describes articles that are freely available on a publisher's website without a clear open licence, and is not considered compliant with most funder mandates.

Creative Commons Licences: What They Mean in Practice

The most commonly required licence for Plan S compliance is CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution). Under CC BY, anyone may copy, redistribute, adapt, and build upon the work as long as they credit the original authors. CC BY-NC restricts commercial reuse and is not Plan S compliant. CC BY-ND prohibits adaptations and is problematic for text and data mining. Journals should be clear in their author guidelines about which licences they offer and whether those licences meet the requirements of major funders.

Transformative Agreements

Transformative agreements are contracts between publishers and institutions or national consortia that convert subscription spending into OA publishing funding. Under a transformative agreement, researchers at member institutions can publish OA in hybrid journals without paying an APC, because the cost is covered by the institutional deal. Transformative agreements are now the dominant mechanism for OA compliance at major research universities in Europe, the UK, Australia, and increasingly in North America and Asia.

The DOAJ: Why It Matters

The Directory of Open Access Journals is the authoritative global registry of fully OA journals. DOAJ listing requires meeting a set of quality criteria: a clear OA policy, copyright retention by authors, publishing under a recognised open licence, transparent APC information, peer review documented on the website, and editorial board published with affiliations. DOAJ listing is referenced in Scopus and Web of Science indexing criteria and is a requirement for compliance with many national OA mandates. For any fully OA journal, DOAJ listing is foundational.

The Equity Dimension

Every OA policy discussion eventually arrives at the equity question: does the shift from reader-pays to author-pays simply relocate the barrier rather than removing it? The concern is most acute for researchers in low- and middle-income countries, early career researchers without institutional funding, and those in disciplines where external grant funding is less common. The responses include APC waivers, diamond OA models, Research4Life programmes, and ongoing advocacy for OA funding models that do not depend on individual author payment. Editors and publishers have a responsibility to engage seriously with this dimension.

The number of academic journals has grown steadily for decades, and yet legitimate gaps in the publishing landscape persist: disciplines where existing journals are over-subscribed, regional research communities underserved by current outlets, and emerging interdisciplinary fields that do not fit neatly into existing structures. If you have identified such a gap and have the institutional backing and editorial commitment to address it, launching a new journal can be one of the most impactful contributions you make to your field. It is also a substantial undertaking that is frequently underestimated.

Start with the Strategic Questions

Before any technical or administrative step, answer these questions honestly: What is the specific gap this journal will fill, and can you articulate it in two sentences to a researcher in your field? Who are the authors and readers this journal will serve, and do those communities actually want another journal? What is the sustainable funding model: subscription, APC-funded OA, diamond OA, or society-supported? Who will do the editorial work, and is that commitment sustainable over years, not months? The journals that fail most often do so not because of technical problems but because the founding editors underestimated the time commitment or launched without a clear funding model.

Assembling the Editorial Board

Your editorial board is the most important decision you will make in the early stages. It sets the intellectual direction of the journal, signals its credibility to the research community, and determines the quality of peer reviewers you can access. A strong, internationally diverse board with active researchers in your scope area will attract stronger submissions. When approaching potential board members, be explicit about the time commitment expected. Board members should be expected to handle a defined number of manuscripts per year, to suggest and review submissions, and to actively promote the journal to their networks.

Registration and Infrastructure

Register your journal's title and obtain an ISSN through your national ISSN centre. Register with CrossRef and set up DOI assignment for your articles. DOIs are the universal identifier system for published articles and are required for indexing, citation tracking, and reference linking. Your manuscript submission and peer review system is the operational heart of the journal. Options range from fully hosted commercial systems (Editorial Manager, ScholarOne) to open source platforms (Open Journal Systems, from the Public Knowledge Project). For a new journal with limited resources, Open Journal Systems is a robust and widely respected option.

Your Peer Review Model

Choose your peer review model deliberately and state it clearly. The main options are single-blind, double-blind, open peer review, and post-publication peer review. Double-blind remains the most common model in most disciplines. Open peer review is growing, particularly in life sciences, and is associated with higher reviewer accountability. Whatever model you choose, document it on your website with specificity, including how reviewers are selected, what the target review timeline is, how conflicts of interest are managed, and what editorial decision categories your system uses.

Ethics Policies and COPE Membership

Join COPE as a member journal. The annual membership fee is modest and the resources are invaluable for an editorial team that will inevitably face misconduct allegations, authorship disputes, and post-publication concerns. Publish substantive policies on authorship (using ICMJE criteria as your baseline), plagiarism detection, data availability, conflict of interest disclosure, and your process for handling corrections and retractions.

Building Submission Volume: The First Two Years

A new journal's biggest challenge is the chicken-and-egg problem: researchers want to submit to journals with an established reputation, but reputation is built through accumulated publications. The strategies that work include a strong launch issue with solicited articles from board members and known researchers in the field (be transparent that these are invited), targeted calls for papers in specific sub-areas where you have strong editorial board coverage, and active promotion at conferences in your scope area. Set realistic expectations for time to first decision, as researchers submit to journals partly based on speed.

The Indexing Timeline

Apply for DOAJ listing as soon as you meet the criteria, typically after publishing your first few issues with sufficient quality and policy transparency. Apply for Scopus and Web of Science (ESCI tier) after two full years of consistent, on-schedule publication. Build your indexing strategy into your editorial calendar from day one. Keep records of every published issue, every peer review round, every editorial board meeting. Launching a journal is a long-term commitment. The founding editorial team sets a culture, a standard, and a vision that will outlast individual editors. Do it with deliberation, with appropriate resources, and with a genuine service to your research community as the animating purpose.