Case Study: Psicológica Overlay Journal Workflow

Thanks to Pandelis Perakakis, Editor of Psicológica this journal, for sharing this case study with COAR.

More information about the transition of Psicológica to an overlay format

• https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/journals-using-overlay-publishing-models-equitable-oa/ 
• https://pandelisperakakis.info/2021/04/21/is-there-life-beyond-publishers/

1. Author submits an article to journal.
2. The editorial board reads and makes a decision on whether to review the article or not.
3. If the article is accepted for review, the author is asked to deposit the preprint into the DIGITAL.CSIC and it is now publicly available and assigned a handle (Persistent URL).
4. An editor or associate editor sends an email to the invited reviewer using the WordPress tools. The email includes an invitation and a link to the open review module in WordPress.
5. If the invited reviewer accepts, they click through the email to a form in WordPress which is the “open peer review module.” (Currently, an editor must manually enter a link from the open peer review module to the preprint in the repository).
6. Once the peer reviews are submitted by reviewers, they are assigned a handle and become openly available from the Digital.CSIC repository.
7. The links to the peer reviews are then added to the landing page of the preprint.
8. Based on the reviews, the journal editor or associate editor makes a decision to either:
   • Request that the author revise and resubmit (return to article submission, step 2);
   • Accept and publish the article in an upcoming issue of Psicológica, after which the preprint in the DIGITAL.CSIC repository is assigned a DOI.

1. Psicológica already had an existing eISSN, as it had been previously published. If your journal does not have an ISSN, you can apply for one here.
2. Editors created a list of databases in which they wanted to be indexed.
3. Editors submitted the journal to Clarivate/JCR and Scopus using this template. They have successfully been indexed in Clarivate and are still waiting for Scopus to respond. 
4. Due to time constraints, the editors have not yet contacted the other indexes, but plan to do so in the future

• WordPress customization: PublishPress, is a plugin that costs 60 Euro per year and manages the peer review process. This requires quite a fair amount of work at the beginning of the setup of the journal.
• If you don’t have a repository with a peer review module There are a number of options in terms of repositories that you can use to host your preprints and published articles including your institutional repository, many of the preprint servers and Zenodo. However, most of these repositories do not offer an open peer review module or functionality. That said, this workflow can also be done in a more manual way. Linking preprints to peer reviews can be done through links and relationships in the metadata of the repository. See COAR-ASAPbio recommendations for more information on how to do this.
• Training on workflows: Training new associate editors has taken time and intention. As such,  Psicológica developed a tutorial to help with onboarding and consistency among editors. 
• Peer review: Managing the peer review process is mainly done via email.
• Time and resources: Running the journal has been a lot of work and it is recommended that, if there are resources available, journals find part-time editorial support