Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Kristen Overstreet and Cara Rivera. Kristen is VP, Editorial Partnerships at KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL), and co-founder of Origin Editorial. Cara is Senior VP, Consulting and Editorial at KGL, and co-founder of editorial services provider, Kaufman Wills Fusting & Company. Reviewer credit to Chef Alice Meadows.
The Informal Model
For much of the twentieth century, the editorial office — the quiet engine of scholarly publishing — was neither an office nor a profession in the modern sense. It was often a spare room, a departmental desk, or a kitchen table. The Editor-in-Chief, almost always a senior male academic, ran the journal alongside a full-time faculty role. Administrative support came from wherever it could be found: a spouse handling correspondence in the evenings; a graduate student paid by the hour; or a departmental assistant juggling editorial work alongside teaching schedules, grant administration, and faculty travel.
That informal model worked — until it didn’t.
Over the past 25 years, as scholarly publishing has grown more complex, more global, and more scrutinized, the editorial office has undergone one of the most significant professional transformations in academia. What was once an ad hoc extension of a university department has become a multilayered, specialized, technology-enabled profession.
When Journals Lived at Universities
For decades, journals were physically and financially housed at universities. Institutions absorbed the costs of staffing, postage, and office space because hosting a journal was seen as a marker of prestige and evidence that a department sat at the center of its discipline. Editorial labor was rarely formalized. Continuity depended on personal relationships, not documented workflows. When an Editor-in-Chief rotated off, institutional memory was often left with them.
Manuscripts arrived by courier in thick envelopes: multiple paper copies destined for editors, reviewers, and filing cabinets. Reviewer invitations were made by phone or letter. Tracking a manuscript’s progress meant consulting handwritten logs or color-coded folders. The system relied on dedication and goodwill, not scalability.
As submission volumes grew and editorial expectations rose, the limitations of this model became increasingly clear. Universities began to pull back funding, unwilling to subsidize what had become a substantial operational burden. At the same time, technology began to loosen the tether between journals and physical locations.
The Digital Break and the End of the One-person Office
The late 1990s and early 2000s marked a turning point. Online manuscript submission systems, including Editorial Manager, ScholarOne, and eJournalPress centralized workflows that had once been dispersed across mailrooms and desktops. Editors no longer needed to sit near their journals. Managing Editors no longer needed to work down the hall from the Editor-in-Chief.
This technological shift triggered a cultural one. The editorial office could now exist independently of any single institution, and with that independence came a need for consistency, documentation, and professional skill sets. Version control, reviewer databases, system configuration, and author communication required expertise that could not be improvized.
The Managing Editor role began to change fundamentally. No longer a catch-all support position, it became a profession requiring training, judgment, and continuous education. Editorial work expanded beyond manuscript tracking to include policy implementation, reviewer development, board coordination, and increasingly, ethics oversight.
This moment of disruption created space for something new.
The Rise of Professional Editorial Services
As universities stepped back, societies and publishers looked elsewhere for stability. A new generation of editorial professionals, many of whom entered publishing unexpectedly from academia, societies, and publishers, recognized a shared problem: editorial offices needed institutional memory, scalable staffing, and best-practice workflows that transcended individual journals and editors.
Then, entrepreneurs founded stand-alone companies, most of them women-owned or co-owned, dedicated to peer review management and editorial consulting. These organizations professionalized what had once been invisible labor. They created career paths where few had existed, invested in training and certification, and built teams capable of supporting journals through editor transitions, policy shifts, and growth.
Importantly, this transformation coincided with a broader cultural shift. Women, long central to editorial work but rarely acknowledged as leaders, were now founding, scaling, and shaping companies that influenced publishing at an industry level. Their impact extended beyond operations to culture, emphasizing collaboration, transparency, mentorship, and shared standards.
Open Access, Scale, and the Division of Labor
The next wave of change came with Open Access publishing, the rise of the mega-journal, and globalization, which together increased the overall rate of submission growth while straining traditional editorial structures. Automation accelerated routine tasks, but it also revealed where human expertise mattered most.
Editorial offices responded by becoming more layered. Routine submission checks, correspondence, and system actions could be standardized and scaled. More advanced responsibilities — reviewer research, special issue management, editorial board development, data and policy interpretation — require experience and subject knowledge.
New specialist roles emerged:
- Subject Editors and PhD-level triage editors, evaluating scope, rigor, and transfer opportunities
- Senior Managing Editors, monitoring submission trends, advising on growth strategy, preparing editorial reports, and interpreting citation and performance analyses
- Research Integrity specialists, developing protocols and managing complex cases involving plagiarism, image manipulation, authorship disputes, and post-publication challenges
This division of labor made economies of scale possible. It also improved resilience: backup coverage, 24-hour turnaround expectations, and continuity during editor transitions became achievable rather than aspirational.
Integrity, Accountability, and Technology as Infrastructure
As publication volumes grew, so did scrutiny. Post-publication commentary and watchdog communities introduced new layers of accountability. At the same time, tools such as ORCID, Similarity Check, and reviewer recognition systems reshaped identity verification and ethical oversight.
Editorial offices became the front line of research integrity.
Technology alone was not enough; it had to be embedded within workflows, supported by trained professionals, and guided by clear escalation pathways. Consulting and managed services became essential not only for efficiency, but for trust.
In this environment, integration mattered. Fragmented systems created risk. Unified workflows linking submission, peer review, integrity screening, production preparation, and reporting provide a pathway to a more defensible scholarly record.
The Next Phase: End-to-end, Author-centric Workflows
Today, the editorial office is entering another period of transformation. Publishers and societies are seeking condensed, end-to-end workflows that move key checks upstream: structured content, XML-first processes, and earlier validation of data, ethics, and authorship. The goal is faster dissemination of high-quality research without sacrificing rigor.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating this shift, not by replacing editorial judgment, but by supplementing checks and reducing the volume of repetitive tasks, freeing experts to focus where they add the most value. Economizing routine labor while elevating higher-level editorial roles is no longer optional; it is fundamental to sustainability.
At the same time, the human core of editorial work remains unchanged. Editors, reviewers, and authors still depend on knowledgeable editorial professionals who can anticipate challenges and steward journals competently through constant change.
From Cottage Industry to Global System
The story of the editorial office is, at its heart, a story of professionalization. What began as informal labor tied to individual academics has become a global infrastructure underpinning scholarly communication.
Over the past quarter-century, editorial service organizations have contributed by:
- Creating durable professional roles and career pathways
- Establishing shared standards and best practices
- Investing in training and continuing education, and
- Improving efficiency, integrity, and cost effectiveness across peer review
As consolidation brings editorial, technology, consulting, and integrity services under unified organizations, the editorial office is no longer a hidden function. It is recognized — finally — as essential to upholding trust in science.
The informal, siloed work at kitchen tables is gone. In its place stands a recognized profession built for quality, scale, scrutiny, and support of the future of research.
The Companies that Professionalized the Editorial Office and the Founders Behind Them
The evolution of the editorial office did not happen in the abstract. It was shaped, decisively, by a generation of founders who recognized that peer review and editorial management were no longer incidental academic tasks, but a core infrastructure for improving the process of scholarly communication. Though launched separately, each contributed to the same industry-wide shift: the transformation of managing editors and editorial staff from isolated support roles into a coordinated, multi-layered profession.
Continuity as the Throughline
If there is a single lesson running through the past 25 years of editorial office evolution, it is this: trust in science depends on continuity. Continuity of standards. Continuity of knowledge. Continuity of people who understand both where the industry has been and where it is going. As co-founders of two of the first editorial services companies, working together at KGL, we plan to help sustain it at scale — ensuring that the modern editorial office is not only efficient and resilient, but worthy of the responsibility it carries at the heart of scholarly publishing.
