My colleague and I work at an Open Access journal, published by a regional scholarly association. The field is Communication and Media Studies. Recently we started to encounter problems with reaching out for authors. We use a small set of professional email lists, listservers and newsletters to disseminate our Call for Articles, which worked in the past 3 years; meaning we always had enough quality submissions from which we could build up a full and content-wise well-balanced issue.
Problem is that recently, we launched a digital marketing campaign after which we received only a handful of manuscripts with average to good publication potential compared to a swarm of plagiarized/incomprehensive/ below-standard/simply uninteresting manuscript mainly from third world countries, India and China (just for clarifications, we do not collect author fees or APCs and all content are free for our readers, so I thought it was clear for everyone that we are not in the pay-to-publish business). We desk reject the majority but enough will remain to completely drain out our reviewer pool for the next 6 months.
I'm asking the community to suggest a better way of reaching out for professional authors. Locally, we are in Eastern Europe and the journal is not ISI or SCOPUS-indexed, so it is not the best for bean-counting purposes; but we have quality content and peer review process. Are there any techniques that should help us convincing western universities to circulate our calls or publish it on their websites? Anyone in the same shoes as we are?
Answer
The key for most scientists is the impact factor. Trying and succeeding to become listed will attract more good manuscripts (MS). The flood of sub-par MS you are describing comes from the fact that you are free. Unless you want to impose a fee for submitting MS you will simply have to maintain a very stringent policy for submissions and hope that the wave ceases with time. In order to attain IF status, you will need to be stringent anyway. But as you probably realise being stringent and building a reputation is a fine balance.
For a budding journal, the most important aspect is to become known and for the right reasons. For starting a journal I would stress making sure you have some good names among the editors and that the idea of the journal is supported by the community. It is never to late to start this but best before your reputation solidifies as a less prominent journal because then the climb will be harder.
So, some suggestions: Thematic issues generally tends to attract citations because they provide the opportunity for someone interested to find other articles within the same field in the same issue. With electronic publishing it is also possible to assemble virtual thematic issues simply by linking to articles with similar aspects and labelling them with a theme, and of course announcing this on list servers etc.
Attracting established, respected and widely referenced authors to provide articles for the journal is also key. You can, for example, provide opportunities to author invited papers on key issues, review articles on key issues in your field etc.
Success will, however, not come overnight and the most important aspect is to gain the interest of your community. This can be a slow process but can be aided by linking up with societies or equivalent in your field. In my field the European Geophysical Union has generated several Open Access journals that quickly has gained IF status. These journals were firmly embedded in the community and emanated from a discussion about the need for journals with a specific target community. So you need to assess your community and see if you can liaise with activities or organisations that are established in your scientific community.
Regardless how you continue, you definitely need to maintain high standards so even if you need to reject the vast majority of submitted manuscripts, make sure you only publish good quality science and make that very clear in your "advertising". Without that basis, very little success can be expected.
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