How to start an academic journal: from ISSN to the first issue and on to indexing

The idea of founding a journal usually comes from an absence: work is piling up in the faculty with nowhere to go, the field lacks a peer-reviewed outlet in the national language, the institution needs a regular publication for visibility. The distance between the idea and the first issue is longer than it looks — and most of that distance is institutional, not technical.

This guide walks through founding a peer-reviewed academic journal in order: which decision comes first, which document comes from where, which step has to wait for which.

Step 0: does the world need another journal?

Founding guides skip this question. A journal’s cost is not its setup but its continuation: finding papers for every issue, reviewers for every paper, reminders for every reviewer. Every country has a long tail of journals that quietly stopped after two or three issues; none was founded in bad faith, and all of them tired in the same place.

Do two honest sums before deciding. Flow: estimate realistically how many quality submissions a year you will attract; two issues a year needs a pipeline of roughly 12–16 papers. Labour: who — under what job description — gives the editor, section editors and secretariat the hours this takes? If the answers are weak, proposing a special issue to an existing journal is usually the better idea.

Step 1: identity, imprint and boards

A journal is a publication, so its owner and officers come first: the proprietor (university, faculty, institute, society), the responsible managing editor, the editor-in-chief. Then its identity gets written down:

• Scope and aims. A definition as broad as “social sciences” makes reviewers harder to find and reads as weak in index evaluation. Starting narrow and widening later is easier than the reverse.
• Frequency. How many issues a year? Two is a sensible start for a new journal — and keeping the frequency you announce is among the first things index committees check.
• Language. The publication language or languages, and which languages abstracts and metadata are required in.
• Boards. Editorial board, section editors, advisory board. A board drawn entirely from one institution and one department is the single most commonly criticised point on independence.

Step 2: ISSN registration

An ISSN is the international identifier for serial publications. Each country has a national ISSN centre; in Türkiye assignment is handled by the ISSN Türkiye Centre within the Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s General Directorate of Libraries and Publications, and it is free of charge.

The process is online. If you have not published before, you register through the publication standards system as a new publisher and then complete the ISSN application form. Print and electronic versions each get their own number (e-ISSN).

One condition catches people out: for online serials, an ISSN requires that the first issue has been published with at least five articles, accessible to the centre. In practice, then, the e-ISSN follows the first issue — plan your timetable accordingly, because “get the ISSN first, gather papers later” does not work.

The book-side equivalents — ISBN, the banderole and the publisher certificate — are covered separately in ISBN, banderole and publisher certificate.

Step 3: writing the policies

Journal policies are the documents that must be written before the first issue and are always incomplete when written after it. The minimum set:

• Review policy. The model (most commonly double-blind), the number of reviewers, what happens when they disagree, and an honest statement of timing. That last matters: journals that answer how long peer review takes on their own website start the author relationship on the right foot.
• Open access and licensing. The access model and licence (commonly Creative Commons). For the model where neither author nor reader pays, see diamond open access.
• Fees. If you charge, say so plainly; if you do not, say that just as plainly. Ambiguity invites suspicion of predatory practice.
• Ethics. Plagiarism screening and thresholds, author contribution statements, conflict of interest, ethics-committee approval, and the correction and retraction procedure.
• Archiving. Where published content will live in the long term.

Step 4: choosing the infrastructure

Only now does the technical decision arrive: where will the workflow run? The realistic options are a hosted national platform, your own OJS instance, a commercial journal system, or a publishing management system in which the journal is one part of the press. We compared their strengths and weaknesses in choosing a journal management system.

Two things are worth settling at founding. First, the submission form: a form that collects everything the editor needs without exhausting the author is the largest single time saving of year one (designing a good submission form). Second, the process record: if who-did-what-when is kept in the system, the index application two years from now will not become an archaeological dig.

Step 5: first call, reviewer pool, first issue

The first issue is a journal’s hardest: it has no reputation yet, and therefore neither authors nor reviewers.

The sequence that works in practice: build the reviewer pool first — starting from the editorial board’s own networks, a list of 40–60 names tagged by specialism is enough for year one. Then open the call; filling the first issue with in-house work is common practice, but keep the proportion low, because the share of in-house authors is one of the headings index committees examine. Then actually run the process: if the first issue’s reviews are perfunctory, that perfunctoriness will define the journal’s next three years.

We have written separately on why finding reviewers got harder; as a new journal, expect a multiple of that difficulty.

Step 6: DOIs and permanent addresses

Articles need permanent identifiers; DOI assignment requires membership of a registration agency (commonly Crossref) and carries a fee. Some hosting infrastructures provide it to the journals they host.

Independently of DOIs, every article needs a permanent, indexable page. Journals that publish only lists of PDFs fall systematically behind in search engines and academic indexes — if the metadata cannot be read, the content does not exist.

Step 7: the indexing roadmap

Indexing is not the first issue’s job; it is a job you prepare for from the first issue onwards.

In Türkiye the first target is usually TR Dizin. The process demands patience: journals whose application is accepted are evaluated after a one-year monitoring period, and for newly launched journals that period is two years. Evaluation looks at your records, not your claims — we covered where peer-review records sit in the application file separately. For current requirements go straight to TR Dizin’s journal evaluation criteria; they are revised periodically.

And one persistent confusion worth repeating: being hosted on a national platform is not the same as being indexed. Hosting infrastructure and index evaluation are different things.

The three most common founding mistakes

Announcing an ambitious frequency. Promising four issues and publishing two is worse by every measure than promising two and publishing two.

Deferring the policies. Journals that say “let’s publish first and write the policies later” end up, at the first ethics complaint or the first index application, reconstructing two years of process from memory.

Tying the process to a person. If the journal’s entire memory lives in one editor’s inbox, the journal resets the day that person moves on. Keeping institutional memory in a system is the least visible and most decisive step in founding a journal.

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If your institution publishes both journals and books, planning the journal’s founding alongside the press as a whole is cheaper from the start. Our university press management guide sets out that wider frame; to talk through your own founding timetable, book a demo.