This guide is designed to help Diamond Open Access (OA) journals (those that charge no fees, either for readers or authors) establish and manage editorial workflows. The guide can be used for managing journals through a dedicated online journal management system or for managing journals manually, via email. The need for a guide on editorial workflows was identified in meetings of the No-Fee Open Access Publishing in Africa Community of Practice. During discussion it became clear that many different approaches and practices were being used in journal publishing and that some steps in the editorial process were not optimally dealt with. Also, we learned that many journals are using Open Journal Systems (OJS), but only for article publishing, while they manage other stages of the editorial workflow manually. The guide focuses on editorial procedures rather than editorial roles, taking into account the realities of small editorial teams and reliance on volunteer work. The guide is divided into sections, each covering a different stage in the editorial workflow, from manuscript submission, through editorial review, selection of reviewers, peer review, production, publication and post-publication discussions. The guide uses screenshots illustrating different editorial procedures in OJS 3.5 (the latest version of the software available at a time of writing this guide), allowing editors to quickly grasp the interface layout and the editorial workflow in OJS. This guide has two annexes: Annex 1 outlines the essential roles and responsibilities required to manage and publish a Diamond OA journal. For journals that use OJS, we show the wealth of useful email templates that OJS provides for different procedures in the editorial workflow. We include these in Annex 2. These templates could be of interest to journal staff who use other journal management systems or manage journals via email. The guide has been developed as part of the Collaboration for Sustainable Open Access Publishing in Africa project, funded by the Wellcome Trust grant number 228148/Z/23/Z. The authors would like to thank the members of the No-Fee Open Access Publishing in Africa Community of Practice, which was established within the framework of this project, for their valuable input and feedback.
Kuchma et al. (Mon,) studied this question.