Understanding your workflow

From a distance every scholarly workflow looks the same: something is submitted, reviewed, improved and shared.

The differences show up in the detail. Two journals both running open peer review may handle it quite differently — one assigns editors, the other works as a flat community. Two preprint review projects may both ingest submissions automatically and still triage them in completely different ways. Teams often describe their needs as “fairly standard”, and then find their submission steps, review stages, content types or decision points are specific to them.

Kotahi expects that. Most of what makes a workflow yours is configuration rather than code: the forms you collect, the roles you use, the stages a submission moves through, the emails that go out at each point, and where the finished work is published.

Knowing your own workflow in detail — what actually happens day to day, not the summary version — is what makes those choices straightforward.