Becoming a publisher

How to become a publisher (journals)

Reviewing and editing are usually where a publishing career begins, but for those with a longer horizon, the path can lead further still, to founding a journal or publishing house of your own. This is a significant undertaking, and it helps to see the full shape of it before starting.

Identify a genuine gap

Search existing databases and current publishers in your field before committing to anything. Check African Journals Online (AJOL), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and any relevant local or continental listings, to establish whether a journal already exists that covers your intended scope. A new publication is only worth creating where a genuine gap exists, a discipline, region, language, or approach that is underserved, not simply because an existing journal is imperfect.

Organise an editorial team

Assemble the people who will run the journal day to day: an editor in chief, section editors where the scope justifies it, and editorial assistants to manage submissions and correspondence. This team carries the workload of screening, coordinating review, and making publication decisions, and its quality shapes the credibility of everything that follows.

Organise an advisory team

Build an advisory board separate from the working editorial team, drawing on respected figures at local, continental and global level as appropriate to your journal’s scope. An advisory board lends standing to a new publication and provides guidance on direction and difficult decisions, without being burdened by daily editorial tasks.

List potential reviewers

Compile a working list of potential reviewers before launch, drawing on the qualifications set out in Lesson 4, published authors in the field, topic and method experts, and people with knowledge of the geographies or populations the journal expects to cover. A new journal cannot function without a reviewer pool ready to call on from its first submission onward.

Write journal policy and guides

Draft the journal’s aims and scope, author guidelines, and reviewer guidelines, and build decolonised publishing principles into them from the outset rather than adding these later. This includes expectations around African and Global South literature, vernacular language use, ethics and consent standards, and a clear AI policy, following the model set out earlier in this course.

Find or create a host

Decide whether the journal will be hosted by an existing institution, university, professional association or society, or whether it will operate independently. A host institution can offer credibility, infrastructure and continuity, but an independent journal retains more control over its editorial direction. Either path is workable, provided the arrangement is clear and sustainable.

Find an online host

Choose a platform to host the journal itself, whether a dedicated journal hosting system, a university’s own repository infrastructure, or a standalone website. This is where submissions are received, review is coordinated, and published issues are made available to readers.

Call for papers, and launch

Issue a call for papers well in advance of your first intended issue, giving potential authors clear guidance on scope, deadlines and submission requirements. A strong first issue, even a small one, matters more for a new journal’s credibility than an early, poorly reviewed one.

Register with indexing institutions

Once the journal is established, register with the indexing bodies relevant to its reach and standing, African Journals Online (AJOL) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) among them, alongside relevant local or national indexing institutions in the countries the journal serves. Indexing is what makes a journal discoverable and citable, and most indexing bodies expect to see a track record of consistent, properly reviewed publishing before they will accept a new title.

Book publishing

• Book publishing follows a broadly similar path to journal publishing, but at greater length and over a longer timeline
• It typically begins with a proposal, setting out the book’s aim, intended readership, chapter outline, and for an edited collection, a list of prospective contributors
• The proposal is itself reviewed before a full manuscript is commissioned, since a publisher or editorial team needs confidence in the idea before investing in the work of writing it
• Once commissioned, chapters or the full manuscript go through peer review much as a journal article would
• Review is checked against the same standards covered throughout this course: sound theory, properly conducted and disclosed ethics, credible methods and evidence, and, for Mtandao aligned publishing, a genuine grounding in African or locally relevant theory and a strong proportion of African and Global South literature
• Authors revise in response to reviewer and editor feedback
• The manuscript then goes through copy editing and typesetting
• The author reviews a final proofed version before publication
• The timeline is considerably longer than for a journal article, often spanning a year or more from proposal to publication, given the length of the work and the coordination an edited collection in particular requires across multiple contributors
• A book carries a single sustained argument, or in an edited collection, a coherent set of contributions bound together by a shared theme, so editors and reviewers assess the coherence of the whole work, not only the quality of its individual parts
• This coordination challenge reaches its fullest extent in book publishing, managing not one author’s work through review but an entire volume’s worth, relevant to anyone considering the publisher’s path set out in the previous topic