Multi-journal governance without erasing journal independence

Central governance should define boundaries

A multi-journal organization needs shared rules, but uniformity is not the same as governance. The central publishing office should identify which controls are institution-wide and which decisions belong to each editorial board. Security, backups, identity management, mandatory metadata and service monitoring are strong candidates for shared control. Scope, review policy, editorial appointments and subject-specific practice normally require journal authority within an agreed institutional framework.

Write a service catalogue and responsibility map

Editors need to know what the central team operates, what the journal must maintain and how incidents are escalated. A practical service catalogue covers platform availability, support hours, data migration, DOI and metadata operations, email, training, accessibility and reporting. A responsibility map names the owner, approver, consulted roles and records for important activities. This prevents both neglected tasks and central teams quietly taking decisions that belong to editors.

Separate journal identity and data

Each title should have a distinct domain or clearly governed public address, visual identity, navigation, policies and archive. Roles and permissions should be scoped so an editor sees only the journals required for their work, while authorized portfolio staff receive aggregate operational views. Separation also applies to confidential manuscripts, reviewer data and exports. Shared infrastructure must not result in accidental cross-journal access or a public experience that hides every title behind the vendor’s brand.

Standardize metadata quality, not scholarly voice

Institutions benefit from common validation for journal title, ISSN, contributors, affiliations, dates, abstracts, funding, licences, references and persistent identifiers. Crossref emphasizes clean, accurate and complete journal and article metadata, while DOAJ expects transparent journal information and publishing practice. Common checks improve interoperability, yet every journal should retain its disciplinary terminology, language policy, article types and editorial explanations.

Measure service and review exceptions

A portfolio dashboard can track availability, submission volume, time in workflow states, overdue tasks, metadata errors and unresolved support cases. Comparisons need context because disciplines and article types differ. Governance meetings should examine exceptions, repeated bottlenecks, access changes and policy updates, then record decisions and owners. Dijider’s model combines separated journal environments with central oversight, so institutions can scale professional operations while the reputation accumulated through each journal remains its own.