Thanks to Cheryl Ball, who encouraged me to share this presentation, to the rest of the CELJ board, and to conference organizers Rick Bonus, Justin Joyce, Yvonne Houy!

Post45 Journal Overview

  • FKA Post45: Peer Reviewed or just Post45
  • Format: Diamond open-access, online-only, peer-reviewed journal
  • Schedule: Irregular publication schedule (individual articles + themed special issues)
  • Scope: articles on American literature and culture since the Second World War
  • Publisher: Post45 (organization), along with Contemporaries and the Post•45 book series at Stanford University Press.
  • Funding
    • fees
    • commercial, nonprofit, or university press
    • Independent/scholar-led
    • University/departmental sponsorship: Yale (2010-2019) and Emory (2020-present)
    • How do we use our funding?
      • web services/hosting (formerly Bluehost, now Microsoft Azure)
      • paying graduate student editors

How and Why We Use Notion

Pre-Notion System

  • Email for corresponding with authors and guest editors
  • MailChimp for newsletters
  • Slack for internal editorial communication
  • Trello for article tracking / submissions management
  • Google Sheets for recordkeeping & history
  • Google Drive for file management
  • Problems with this setup
    • Contact list disorganized
    • Problems with recordkeeping
      • Details about past submissions, editorial process lost in long email threads
      • Google Sheet was always missing information / out of date, because we only used it for recordkeeping (and it duplicated information we more actively used in Trello)

What is Notion?

  • About Notion
    • “All-in-one workspace,” cloud-based software
  • create documents and wikis
  • links between documents
  • collections of documents (data tables/boards to organize documents based on metadata)
    • ⁠many of our documents are “empty” (metadata only)
  • ⁠additional features:
    • ⁠integrations with other services (e.g., Slack, Google Drive)
    • basic automations (e.g., send notifications when certain metadata fields chang, e.g., when the managing editor adds a reader’s report or links it to an article)

Why and how do we use it?

  • Free (Education+ Plan)
  • We use it to organize and consolidate most of our information & data
    • people
      • authors
      • guest editors
      • peer reviewers
    • reader’s reports
    • articles (review process)
    • articles (copy editing and production process)
    • other projects and tasks
  • Data tables are linked
  • helps keep us organized (due dates, single place to leave notes on article)
  • Easy to sort, filter, and query / compile stats
    • use cases that weren’t possible with our old system:
      • searching for potential peer reviewers
      • Identifying trends / patterns in our timelines

Our Setup

  • Main Databases
    • Peer Review (Articles)
    • Copy Editing (Articles)
    • People (Authors, Reviewers, and Editors)
  • Additional Databases
    • Special Issues
    • Reader’s Reports
    • Tasks/Projects

Limitations

  1. Lack of granular access, privacy, and permissions controls (databases are all-or-nothing) (summary of the issue + compilation of complaints / requests: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/173q38a/notions_missing_piece_database_views_access/)
    1. sharing status with special issue editors?
    2. adding a form for submissions (would be ideal if we could provide permissions for authors to view the status of their articles – we can only share entire databases or nothing).
  2. Notifications limited, but can use integrations
  3. Online only (cloud service could be hacked, they could make a major error, or the company could go under abruptly, losing all data) – no auto-backup or export. Should run a backup / download periodically!

Alternatives / Competitors

  • AirTable (education discount, but no free plan)
  • Obsidian (free and more customizable, but requires more configuration & is mostly designed for individual rather than collaborative/team use)
  • Trello (great for tasks, but less flexible)
  • Google Sheets (our previous system)
  • Commercial Submissions Management: most are unaffordable for individual journals (publishers can negotiate volume/enterprise discounts)
    • Scholastica: $425 per year plus $10 per submission
    • Submittable: $10K / year
    • Editorial Manager & ScholarOne (non-transparent pricing, must book a demo / talk to their sales team for a quote)
      • ScholarOne / Manuscript Central (according to a 2009 source) is at least $3500/year + $2000 startup fee
      • Editorial Manager is $5000/year