Special Issues & Collections

For a variety of reasons, you may want to publish a group of articles outside of your journal’s normal schedule or remit. This can be done in the form of a special issue (or a special collection, as detailed further down this page). However, there are some points of logistics and good practice for editors to remember, to ensure that a special issue or collection goes through a smooth editorial process. 

Benefits of Special Issues

It can be beneficial for a journal to publish special issues. 

• You can showcase particularly relevant and up-and-coming areas in the journal’s field. 
• Putting out a call for papers (CFP) that is more targeted and specific can help to focus potential submissions on a particular topic. 
• This can draw new readers and submitters to the journal, and otherwise foster new collaborations (e.g. if you work on a special issue in conjunction with a particular institution). 
• You may involve guest editors, which can be beneficial for their own career development, and may broaden the pool of general editors and reviewers on your journal, and to help share the workload. 
• This can help diversify the expertise of the journal’s editors and reviewer pool if new editors and reviewers are brought in for the topic. 

Putting Together a Special Issue

There are a few main steps when putting together a special issue. 

1. Deciding on a topic. This may be led by either: a) a new area of interest in the field, b) the existing expertise of the journal team, c) the expertise of a guest editor, if one is sourced before the call for papers goes out. 
2. Disseminating a call for papers. This should contain all the necessary information such as the topic, the word limit and the deadline for submission. Please note that if your journal has author-facing APCs, this must be very clear and transparent in your CFP. 
3. Reviewing and editing the papers. If you are involving guest editors, there are some issues of good practice and ethics that need to be considered, outlined below. 

Guest editors: Good practice and potential issues. 

Some journals are hesitant to call in guest editors because they can sometimes expose the journal to ethical issues such as review manipulation, citation cartels, and undeclared conflicts of interest. It is important to ensure that this does not happen, partly for the sake of good academic practice, but also because the regular editorial staff, and the journal as a whole, are still ultimately responsible for the journal output. 

The best way to avoid problems arising is to pick your guest editors carefully. This might involve a) picking people that you personally know, although this can limit your pool, or b) researching possible guest editors to look at their own research output, and to check for any previously reported cases of malpractice. It is also possible, depending on the composition of your regular editorial team, to pair a guest editor with an editor/section editor, who can also help guide them through the process of using the editorial system, as well as ensuring that good practice is followed through review. It may also be helpful for the editor in chief to spot check a few of the papers that have been accepted, looking through e.g. the reviews, the email addresses attached to author/reviewer accounts etc, for any signs of identity theft or review manipulation. 

It is also important that you make a guest editor aware of how to use the editorial system so that they are able to put the papers through review competently and efficiently, and to make sure they are aware of the ethics policies and submission guidelines of your journal so that they do not come into conflict with them. The guest editor must know the workflows, standards, and timelines expected of them before both the journal and the guest editor(s) agree to start the partnership.

Despite these caveats,  it can be highly beneficial to bring in a guest editor. For COPE guidance on guest editorship and special issues, please see here. 

The Ubiquity Press special collection policy may be useful when considering how to create a policy for your own journal.

If you handle your own production, you can publish a special issue in the same way you would publish a normal issue. If Ubiquity provides production services for your journal, when you are ready to publish the issue, please let either production or your Editorial Account Manager know that the issue is to have a special name, and, if necessary, a custom cover so they can set up the issue correctly. 

Ubiquity’s Collection Workflow

While special issues are an excellent tool, they cover a very short time period of research and perspectives. In the Ubiquity workflow, it is also possible to group some articles together as ‘collections’. 

This function is different from a normal special issue (although it can be used as one). While a special issue is an issue that is grouped by a particular topic, and published together in one issue, a special collection groups articles together in a more flexible manner. A collection is set up independently of any particular issue, and articles can be added to it as and when they are published. Therefore, it still functions to group articles together on a single topic, but can draw on publications across all years that the journal has been active.