For societies

Your journal, published properly

Learned societies own the scholarship in their fields and increasingly cannot afford to publish it. We take on production, platform, distribution and indexing, and leave the editorial control exactly where it belongs — with your members.

Start a conversation See how our journals work

What we offer

Production: Copy-editing, typesetting, proofing and XML, to a schedule agreed with your editor rather than imposed on them.
Platform: Your journal on this platform with its own masthead, its own metrics page and its own archive, findable through the same search as everything else here.
Identifiers & indexing: Crossref DOIs, ISSN registration, ORCID integration, and indexing submissions made on your behalf with a frank assessment of which indexes are likely to accept.
Editorial system: Lantern — submission, reviewer matching, structured reports and decision letters — configured to your journal's own workflow.
Distribution: Institutional licensing through our existing agreements, so your journal reaches libraries that already have a relationship with us.
Member access: Your members read the journal free, authenticated against your membership list, without needing an institutional licence.

Editorial independence

The society appoints the editor. The society sets the scope. The society owns the title, the archive and the reputation, and takes all three with it if the arrangement ends.

We have no mechanism by which to influence an editorial decision on your journal, and we would not want one. A society journal whose publisher can lean on its editor is worth less to its members than one that cannot.

Commercial terms

Revenue share: A published percentage of subscription and APC revenue attributable to your title, reported quarterly with the underlying figures rather than the summary.
No confidentiality on price: We do not ask societies to keep their terms secret. A society comparing offers should be able to compare them.
Exit: Three years' notice either way, and you leave with the title, the archive, the DOIs and the subscriber list. Exit terms are agreed at the start, when both parties are optimistic, rather than at the end when neither is.
Open access route: If your society wants the journal fully open access and cannot fund it from APCs, say so at the outset — we run three diamond journals and can talk about how they are paid for.

Transferring a journal

Moving a journal between publishers is where continuity usually breaks: DOIs stop resolving, archives go missing, and libraries discover the change at renewal.

The archive comes first: Complete backfile migrated and verified — every DOI resolving to the right article — before the first new issue publishes here.
Libraries told early: Ninety days' notice to every subscribing institution, with the effect on their holdings spelled out, whoever is losing the title.
Editorial continuity: The board carries on. Manuscripts in review transfer with their files and their reviewers wherever the reviewers consent.
No gap: We agree the first issue date before signing, and we do not publish a partial year that leaves subscribers with a hole in their run.

Launching a new journal

If your field has no home, bring a scope statement, a prospective board and an argument about what is not currently being published. We will be honest about how long indexing takes — Scopus and DOAJ want a publication record before they will consider a title, and no publisher can shorten that for you.

Propose a journal For editors