My Crash Course on Founding a Student Journal
- Shelby Haber
- Sep 6, 2024
- 2 min read
During this year's back-to-school season, I'm reflecting on the experiences that piqued my interest in editing. As an undergrad, I volunteered with the University of Alberta's Spectrum journal. I enjoyed the experience so much that, when I realized there wasn't any graduate-level English journal at McGill University (where I had accepted to start my graduate studies), I founded Caret. Today I'd like to share a "crash course" of what the founding editorial board did to get the journal up and running.
We completed 3 big tasks in our semester-long planning stage:
Writing information documents
Understanding everyone's strengths
Clarifying our relationships
Writing Information Documents
The first of these documents was a to-do list, and it was certainly daunting! Once we had our goals in front of us, though, we succeeded in writing our:
a) Editorial Aims and Scope
b) Editorial Workflow
c) Author Guidelines
d) Author Agreement
e) Submission Guidelines
f) Reviewer Guidelines
g) Reviewer Sign-Up Form
For each document, we delegated 2-3 people to write a draft. Then, during our next meeting, we read out the draft and made small changes. We completed the process by completing related documents, such as a chart that visualized the editorial workflow. Each document found a place in a Google Drive folder, depending on when we would use it during the editorial process:

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