Why Kotahi exists

Most submission systems are built around one workflow: a journal receives a manuscript, sends it for review, and publishes it. That model still exists, and Kotahi supports it.

In addition, a lot of scholarly publishing no longer looks like that. Preprints are reviewed after they appear. Repositories ask journals to review work they host. Communities curate research without owning it. Some of what gets reviewed is not a paper at all — a dataset, a sampling plan, a course collection.

A system with one workflow built into it cannot describe those. Teams end up working around their software, or running the parts it cannot handle in spreadsheets and email.

Kotahi exists because there is more than one way to publish. The forms you collect, the roles people hold, the stages a submission moves through, the decisions and who makes them — these are settings, not assumptions baked into the code. You describe your workflow to the software, rather than the other way round.

What that means in practice is covered in What Kotahi is and Technology supporting people.