Law Review Board Transition Cheat Sheet
Between journal duties, school work, and outside obligations, it's no secret that law review editors are stretched to the limit and don't always have time to successfully connect the newly elected board to Scholastica. Whatever the situation your board finds itself in, having a plan to quickly and efficiently onboard your new editors can smooth the transition and, in many cases, spur positive innovations for your journal.
Steps for the outgoing board
1. Add the new board’s admin editor to Scholastica
Give the new team access to the Scholastica account so they can start updating the account and poring through submissions!
To invite the new admin editor to Scholastica, the admin editor of your law review’s Scholastica account will go to My Journals > Settings > Manage Editors then click “ Invite New Editor”.
You can invite your entire article selection team at once by entering their email addresses as a comma-separated list. Then simply pop in a quick letter explaining that they’ll need to accept this invitation and sign up in order to access the Scholastica account.
Now you'll set the permissions for each editor to ensure they have access to the papers that are appropriate for them. For law reviews, we recommend that all of your editors are set to "Automatic access to all submissions past, present, and future" to ensure that no papers slip through the cracks.
2. Transfer the admin rights
If you've gotten through elections and you're ready to invite the new board to your Scholastica account, chances are, you don't need admin access to the journal anymore. At this time, it's best to transfer the admin rights over to the new member of the editorial board that will manage the settings in journal's Scholastica account.
To transfer the admin rights, be sure to invite the new admin editor first. They will need to have an account before you can transfer the rights. Next, the current admin will go to Settings then choose the name of the new admin editor from the drop down menu on the right.
Once the admin rights have been transferred, you can gracefully step away as the new board takes over the account!
Steps for the incoming board
Set your team up for success:
- Remove last year’s board from Scholastica
- Add your board's editors to Scholastica
- Customize your journal’s settings
- Update your journal’s public profile
- Filter out old manuscripts
1. Remove last year's editors from Scholastica
The previous board has handed over the reins to you - congratulations! Now you’ll want to ensure that they no longer have access to sensitive information like author manuscripts since they are no longer an active board member (and because they don’t want to keep getting emails from Scholastica!).
To remove old editors your law review’s admin editor will:
- Navigate to My Journals > Settings > Manage Editors
- Check the boxes for the editor(s) who should no longer have access to the journal account
- Click the "Actions" dropdown that will appear once you've selected an editor and select "Revoke"
2. Add your board’s editors to Scholastica
Give your team access to the Scholastica account so they can start poring through submissions!
There are two ways you can add your team to Scholastica:
- An “editor” on Scholastica is someone who has access to all of your submissions and has the ability to: self-assign articles, fill out your review rubric, and read other editors’ reviews.
- A “reviewer” on Scholastica is someone who can only see the submissions they are assigned, cannot see each other’s review rubrics, and cannot communicate with authors.
Adding your team as “editors”
To invite your team to Scholastica, the admin editor of your law review’s Scholastica account will go to My Journals > Settings > Manage Editors then click “ Invite New Editor”.
You can invite your entire article selection team at once by entering their email addresses as a comma-separated list. Then simply pop in a quick letter explaining that they’ll need to accept this invitation and sign up in order to access the Scholastica account.
Now you'll set the permissions for each editor to ensure they have access to the papers that are appropriate for them. The three levels of viewing permissions are:
- Setting manuscript access when inviting editors
- No default access to submissions: Editors set to this level are not granted access to view any manuscripts automatically. You can manually grant access to specific papers on a case-by-case basis for editors with this level of permission.
- Automatic access to new submissions only: Editors set to this level are only granted access to manuscripts submitted after this user was invited to gain editor access to the journal account. I.e. Journal A has received 10 submissions in March. Eddie Editor was invited to become an editor on April 1st. A new paper is submitted on April 2nd. Eddie will only have access to the new paper submitted on April 2nd and will not see the previously submitted papers unless manually granted access by another editor.
- Automatic access to all submissions past, present, and future: Editors set to this level are automatically granted access to all papers that have ever been submitted to the journal.
- Select the appropriate viewing permissions for each editor, then click Save and close.
Please note: The admin editor can always edit editor manuscript permissions later on the Configuration Options page.
Adding your team as “reviewers”
Since reviewers do not have access to the manuscript table, you must invite them to individual manuscripts by:
- Going to My Journals > Manuscripts then clicking the title of the manuscript you’d like them to review.
- Clicking “Reviewers” on the left then “Invite Reviewer”
- Clicking “Non-Scholastica User” to invite that editor for the first time. If they have written a review for you, that reviewer’s profile will appear under the “Past Reviewers” tab.
- Entering an invitation message, selecting a deadline, and clicking “Send invitation"
- NOTE: You can input a reviewer invitation message in the templates section on the right to save yourself time!
3. Customize your settings
Scholastica has flexible configuration options to ensure that your law review can operate in a way that works for your team. A few of the settings that your journal admin will want to consider tweaking are listed here.
Automatically assign manuscripts
Save yourself the tedious task of ensuring that each and every manuscript has an editor assigned to it by enabling "auto assign" in your configuration options.
When your journal's administrator has enabled this option, as manuscripts are submitted, they are automatically, evenly distributed between the editors that your admin has selected.
To enable automatic assignment:
- From your Dashboard, click My Journals.
- Click the Settings tab.
- Click the Journal Settings tab from the dropdown menu
- Click Configuration Options.
- Scroll down to Manuscript Access and Assignment Options.
- Click the checkbox next to each recipient who should or shouldn’t be automatically assigned articles as they are submitted.
- Click Update Journal to save changes.
Email Notifications
Many actions within Scholastica will generate email notifications. In this section, your journal's administrator can determine which actions send emails and to whom.
- From your Dashboard, click My Journals.
- Click the Settings tab.
- Click the Journal Settings tab from the dropdown menu
- Click Configuration Options.
- Scroll down to Email Options.
- Click the checkbox next to each recipient who should or shouldn’t be receiving emails for each action.
- Click Update Journal to save changes.
Open/close submissions to your journal
The admin editor can open and close submissions to your journal in your journal’s Settings.
- From your Dashboard, click My Journals.
- Click the Settings tab.
- Click the Journal Settings tab from the dropdown menu
- Click Configuration Options.
To OPEN for submissions:
- Click the button "Open submissions."
To CLOSE submissions:
- Enter a message to explain when you’ll next be accepting submissions.
- Click the button "Close submissions”
4. Update publicly-visible journal information
When submission season rolls around, you’ll want to ensure you have the most up-to-date information available for authors. Why? Because authors read the information that you have listed!
Authors click “Guidelines” to read the information you have posted on your “For Authors” page when they’re preparing to submit.
To update your journal profile information (editorial board, for authors, etc.)
The admin editor will go to My Journals > Settings > Visit Journal Website then click edit page in the grey toolbar on the left to edit the current page.
5. Filter out old manuscripts
When you first log into your journal account and head to the Manuscripts table, you may be dismayed to see that there are already manuscripts in there, possibly from last year or older. How do you get rid of the old manuscripts? Just 1. Reject them and then 2. Filter them out.
Rejecting old manuscripts
“Why do I need to reject the submissions that came in while the last board was in office? Heck, why do I need to make decisions in Scholastica at all?”
Excellent questions! Here’s why it’s important:
- If you don’t make decisions on old submissions, you won’t be able to move as efficiently through your new submissions.
It is easy to clear out old submissions, and you can either reject several manuscripts at once or, if your account is still closed for submissions from last time, you can reject all manuscripts that are still “under review”.
- Authors want decisions and they respect law reviews that have the courtesy to give them a rejection rather than radio silence.
Don’t believe us? Read for yourself.
Filtering out rejected manuscripts
Once you’ve given every old article that was "Under Review" a decision, you can then use the manuscript table’s filters to only look at newly submitted articles.
To filter and only view newly submitted, “under review” articles:
- Go to My Journals > Manuscripts > Click to open the blue filtering side panel on the left of the page
- Click "Manuscript Status" and then select “under review” from the filter
Bonus Step
Check to see if your law review's university's website has a Scholastica submission button
If you want to give your authors a quick and easy way to submit to your journal, adding a submission button is a great place to start! Give your website a once over to see if your site currently has a submission button embeded onto the submissions page.
If you're interested in updating your journal's website, click here to learn more about Scholastica's Publishing product and sign up for a demo!
To add a submission button to your law review’s personal website
Make it easy for authors to submit to your law review (and reduce the clutter/confusion coming into your journal’s email inbox!) by adding a Submit via Scholastica button to your law review’s website.
Adding a button to your website is as easy as following these three steps:
- Have your law review’s admin editor go to Settings
- Copy the code found there
- Send the code to your website’s manager to add to your submissions page!
