Getting an Academic Journal Running on Depression Research
Setting up a proper academic journal focused on depression is less glamorous than people think. It takes infrastructure work, editorial policies, and enough peer reviewers to actually sustain a publication cycle. I built one at my institution around six years ago and learned a lot of hard lessons along the way. First, you need a governing body. This isn't just a fancy website. You need an editorial board with real affiliations, a scope statement that won't be immediately rejected by every researcher in the field, and a manuscript tracking system. Most journals use ScholarOne or Editorial Manager. They cost money. My first attempt used a free system called Open Journal Systems, and it worked fine until we hit about forty submissions per issue. Then the database started choking on search queries. The scope matters more than anything else. A journal titled "Depression Research Journal" with no defined boundaries will get submissions from psychiatrists, psychologists, neuroscientists, social workers, and people doing meta-analyses. You cannot peer review all of that competently. We narrowed our scope to clinical and translational depression research only. That cut our submission pile in half and made reviewer matching significantly easier.
The Editor Board Problem Nobody Talks About
Recruiting an editorial board for a new depression journal is hard. Established researchers won't join because they don't want to burn capital on a journal with no impact factor yet. The ones who will join are either early-career academics looking for a line on their CV or retired researchers with too much time on their hands. Neither group gives you the editorial rigor you need. My workaround was pairing senior reviewers with junior board members. I created a two-tier system where senior members signed on for six months with a commitment to mentor a junior editor on each paper they handled. The senior editors got mentorship credits, which counted toward certain institutional requirements. The junior editors got real training. It was not elegant but it worked for three years until I left the project.
Peer Review Workflow
Depression research has specific methodological issues that generalist reviewers miss. When I reviewed manuscripts during setup, I noticed recurring problems with PHQ-9 validation in non-English populations and inconsistent exclusion criteria across clinical trials. Your review criteria need to explicitly address these. Standard peer review templates from Elsevier or Springer don't account for depression-specific methodological quality checks. We built custom review forms that included sections on patient population definitions, comorbidity reporting standards, and statistical handling of dropout rates. Dropouts in depression trials are notoriously problematic because they are rarely missing at random. A journal that does not flag this during review is publishing flawed data. This added about twelve minutes to each review process but it caught serious issues in roughly twenty percent of submissions during our first year.
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Common Pitfalls in Journal Setup
Impact factor chasing is the biggest mistake I see. New editors will set their acceptance rate to sixty or seventy percent to attract high-profile papers, thinking citations will follow. This backfires immediately because papers without rigorous review generate zero citations and the journal gains a reputation for being easy. We set ours at thirty-five percent for the first two years. Submissions dropped initially but the ones we published were harder to dismiss. Another trap is geographic bias. Depression research comes from everywhere but most reviewers cluster in North America and Western Europe. When we started, we had a submission from a team in South Korea working on cultural variants of depressive presentation. Two American reviewers rejected it for "insufficient novelty" because their training had not covered non-Western depression phenomenology. I had to find a reviewer who actually understood the methodology before the rejection went out. This took three weeks. Your submission guidelines should explicitly state that cultural context is evaluated by regional experts.
Technical Infrastructure Costs
Expect to spend between eight thousand and fifteen thousand dollars annually for the first three years. This covers the submission system, DOI registration through Crossref, copyright management, hosting, and basic indexing fees. If you plan to offer open access, you need APC processing funds or an institutional subsidy. Many universities will cover this if your journal aligns with their research priorities. Ours was under the psychology department's budget, which helped for the first two years before they requested we find external funding. Indexing is not automatic. Scopus and Web of Science both have application processes that require a minimum of two years of publication history. PubMed indexing requires a different application altogether. Plan for this timeline because it directly affects your visibility. A depression journal without PubMed indexing will struggle to attract submissions from clinical researchers who need that pipeline for their own publication requirements.
When Setup Fails
Sometimes the model simply does not work. If you cannot secure consistent reviewer coverage within six months of launch, delay publication. We held eight manuscripts for four months because our depression methodology reviewers were all tied up with grant reviews. Those papers were eventually processed with proper review after the backlog cleared. Pushing them through early would have damaged credibility more than delaying them. The alternative to building your own journal is contributing to existing ones with special issues. Some depression-focused journals like the Journal of Affective Disorders or Depression and Anxiety accept special issue proposals on niche topics. This gives you editorial experience without the infrastructure burden. I recommended this path to several colleagues who wanted to enter academic publishing but lacked institutional support for a full journal launch.
