 So, make sure that you're not just hearing about it, that you're actually working it into your process. I would also think about what defines a successful transition for you. Whether that's financials for the society, whether that's, you know, a redesign for the journal, a better production workflow, a better editorial workflow, what is going to make this transition a success? The next thing that you really want to get down on paper in concrete, if you can, is the timeline of your transition. So there are going to be a lot of dates that you're going to need to hit. The first thing that you're going to need to know is the official date of your transition. So there will be a handover date. A lot of times it's something like January 1st or December 31st, when the official handover from old publisher to new publisher will happen. Because that is often January 1st with annual contracts, a thing that you want to keep in mind is you're probably not working on January 1st. Maybe the publisher or your editors aren't either. So make sure that when you set a transition date, you know, if that's a holiday, if that's, you know, July 1st and that's a Saturday, that's something that you're going to want to think around. So once you have that official transition date, I would recommend creating a timeline backwards from that date of all of the sort of transition dates that you need to hit. So site transition dates, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, can be really important. We'll go into that in more depth in a minute, as well as submission and submission system transition dates. Your issue and production transition dates are also really important. So at what point will accepted papers from the old publisher start moving to the new publisher? At what point are you going to move archived issues and manuscripts from the old publisher to the new publisher? Your marketing dates can also be really important, which we'll also talk about. At what point are you going to announce this to your readers? At what point are you going to announce this to your society members? So making sure that you give yourself enough time to accomplish all of these steps in the process and really getting a concrete date of this is when it's going to happen. This is who's responsible for this step in the process. And have a full calendar out. Now, another thing to think about is how much time you have to accomplish these things. Do you have a full year? Do you have six months? Do you have two months? You know, give yourself as much time as you can so that you can be as prepared as you can be to make each step. I would highly recommend that once you get those nails, those dates nailed down that you monitor each date. Don't just let them pass by proactively communicate which with each key player to say, OK, you know, the date of the site transition is coming up. Do we have everything in place? What haven't we thought about who's responsible for each piece of this puzzle? So make sure that you are keeping an eye on those dates and that everything that needs to happen around them is happening. Our next thing to think about is who your key players are. You might know a lot of the people in your society, certainly your editors and the people in the new and the old publisher, but there also might be people involved in the transition that you don't normally work with. You'll need to identify who those people are when they should be looked in and which decisions they are responsible for making. So that's another big part. So is your society, for example, your big decision maker? What decisions are you going to be responsible for making? Which decisions are up to the editor and which decisions are up to the publisher? So that's really good to sort of lay those things out so that you are communicating with, first of all, the correct people and not leaving someone out of a meeting or a communication and also not looping too many people in when you don't need to. Communication is so important in this process. I truly believe that you can't over communicate with a publisher transition. There are so many moving pieces and there are so many things up in the air and so many people responsible for different things that I highly recommend as much communication as you can. Whether that means setting up regular calls with different key players, creating live tracking sheets, making sure that you have a very clear email thread. Sometimes email threads can get very jumbled or convoluted, so making sure that those lines of communication stay clear. I would also recommend either creating or updating policy documents around the transition and making sure that they stay up to date. So maybe you have new initiatives or you're making decisions or you're changing something in your workflow or your process. There are so many people involved that can be very helpful to make sure that you have clear documentation of the decisions that are being made and making sure that they really do stay up to date because maybe early in the transition you've decided what we're going to do it this way and then a few months later once things are playing out you say well it actually makes sense that we do it another way. Document that. That way when it comes up again you can say you know we know the decision that we made and why we made it. Next I want to talk about system transitions. I really do feel like this is a big part of the puzzle especially for managing editors who are using that system as well as for your editors. So this is a big pain point or can be a big pain point for both the editorial office and your editors. So possibly you're switching submission systems and maybe you're not but there are things to think about either way. So if you are switching submission systems or you might need training in that new system, that's one thing to think about. But then you also want to think going back to your timeline when this transition is going to happen. It's probably going to happen well before the official transition date which it should. So you need to know how long you're going to have access to the old system. Do you lose it on the official transition date? Do you lose it before or after that? How long can you have new submissions submitted to the old system and when can new submissions be submitted to the new system? Usually that's the same date. I would recommend that you plan for it to be the same date so that there's a clear transition for new manuscripts. But then you also want to think about revised manuscripts which are sort of a secondary problem. So when you're thinking about revised manuscripts, do you have an opportunity for the revisions to keep coming in to the old system? Because you want to think about your author experience. What's going to be easiest for them? It's going to be easier for them to keep their manuscript on one system and get a final decision on it. In the old system so that they don't have to submit a new submission to the old system and then a revised submission to the new system. So make sure you're communicating with your authors especially if you have maybe several months to work with your old system. The more time that you have, the better it is for your authors. The more time that they have to work their manuscript through to a final decision, whether that be accept or reject. And similar to that, you need to think about when your editors need to have all of those decisions made in the old system. And you need to think about training your editors in the new system and preparing them for that transition. That's sort of a big piece of the puzzle. Does anybody have questions about that or experiences that they've had? I've seen some journals will do everything they can in the old system and some journals will say, you know what? We're going to go ahead and submit it in the new system because that's easiest for production of the new publisher. So there's a lot of different ways that it can be done. My biggest advice is to have a plan, especially when it comes to your timeline for that. And that's another opportunity for communication, communication with your authors, letting them know that we're going to be introducing this new system and what the plan is for their revision and for production publication of their article. I would really recommend working with your production team, both of your old publisher and your new publisher, to develop a plan for manuscripts that are accepted on each system and how to move forward with those. So most likely you're going to have papers that are accepted in your old system that will have to be published by your new publisher. So develop a plan of how your new publisher is going to receive those manuscripts and how they're going to be tracked. And there might even be different requirements from each production department. So make sure that if the new production department has a different checklist or requirements or policies that you are following those manuscripts that have been accepted. So if they need the title page in a different format or if they need a different set of ethics questions answered, things like that, you might have to work with the authors to make sure that those are supplied. This is a great opportunity for your journal though. It's a good opportunity to review your workflow and how it might be improved with a new submission system. It's also a great opportunity to review things like letter templates and submission questions. You're going to want to make sure that those adhere to your new publishers policies, but it also might be a good opportunity to introduce fresh language or new policies or requirements on the editorial side. If you're staying with the same submission system, there will still be some of these things that you want to think about. So probably just the license of the submission system will change from the old publisher to the new publisher. But you're still going to want to make sure that you review definitely your letter templates and your submission questions because it probably has language for the old publisher. And again, still review your workflow. It's still an opportunity for change and improvement that you can act at that point. Marketing is always a good thing to consider. It's usually something that we in the editorial office may or may not have a lot of responsibility over, but it's something that we can really help with and make sure that the communication about the transition is going out to the right parties and then it's clear. So some of the things that you might want to think about is who you are communicating with about the transition and what you are telling them. So you might want to tell them dates for the transition, the benefits, why you're doing it. Make sure you're providing links to the new sites and how to log into those sites. So if it's, you know, a member access, they need to know how to access it with their member login. Who are you communicating to? Are we just talking to authors and reviewers? Are we talking to all of our readers? Are we talking to just society members? All of those groups are looping at other people. Who is that messaging going to come from? Is it going to be from the society? Is it going to be from the publisher? Or is it going to be from you? That's a good thing to think about. Another thing to consider is the timeline for your marketing communications. Do you want to tell people a year in advance, six months in advance? Or do you just want to do some targeted communication right around the transition? A few weeks before, maybe a couple days after just to let people know. And you might just decide, well, how much will this affect those people? That might be a consideration. If it's really going to make a big difference, for example, if you're changing submission systems, that's something that your authors and reviewers need to know about. You're staying on the same submission system? Maybe not. Maybe you're just letting them know, hey, we've got some publisher transitions and just our homepage is going to change. How are you going to be communicating this? Are you going to be sending email blasts? Are you going to have announcements or messages on the society pages? Are you going to be updating messages on your submission site? So think about those things where people will see them to communication can be the most effective. This is also a really great opportunity to look at your branding of your journal and maybe do a redesign. Most likely your new publisher is going to want to do different formatting. They're going to have a different type setter. It's a great opportunity to give your journal a facelift, a new look and feel, especially taking advantage of maybe your new publisher's marketing team or their designers and really make it sort of a new journal in that aspect. So that's my main points that I wanted to touch on with publisher transitions. There's quite a bit more and there really are a lot of balls in the air with publisher transitions. But those are the big things to think about and you can sort of see how each of them interact with each other and how there can be big opportunities for your journals in each of those pieces. So thanks for your time and I'd be happy to take any questions that you have. Does anybody have any questions? I was going to ask what are some of the more common issues you see people getting tripped up on in this transition. I think that's a great question. I think a lot of the time it can be very unclear as whose responsibility something is. And I think sometimes you have a little friction working with the old and new publishers. So sometimes maybe the new publisher has to get archive material or things like that from the old publisher. They have to make a big switch from site to site. It can be a little bit of maybe some diplomacy can be enacted there. But sometimes that's hard because maybe your old publisher isn't in a big hurry to do some of those things for you. But of course your new publisher and your editorial team are very eager to get those things off the ground. It can also sometimes be hard to know who to communicate what to I think. And I think your timeline also even if you plan it really well sometimes as we all know things often take longer than we plan even if we planned really well. So I think sometimes even building in buffers or windows into your timeline can be really helpful. I actually have a question our last meeting was on project management. And so as you're going through this this is requiring an enormous amount of planning and foresight and organization. So I'm wondering if there's a specific methodology or software or organizational system that you would that you've used or would recommend to kind of help you stay organized. I haven't I think that would be great. And when I was putting this presentation together, I had a mix of, you know, things that I did that I thought worked really well. And then I was also looking in hindsight of things that I wish I had done. So I think a lot of the things when I talked about, for example, documenting all of your decisions and making sure that any policy documents stay up to date. I think those are things that are really important. I don't have a good recommendation of maybe software or an app to use for that. But if anybody does, I would love to hear it. I have a question about submission system transfer. How much data do you know, like, I'm guessing database like members transfers, but I'm wondering about like historical data. So I was just asked by my editor-in-chief to tell me how many manuscripts we've gotten from the UK in the past 10 years. Would something like that still be, you know, if you had switched the site two years ago, would I only be able to tell you the last two years of data? That's a great point. That's something that I did not talk about, but I'm happy to touch on. So you're sort of asking two different questions. So I would highly recommend, well, well before or there's sort of an argument to it just before you lose access to your old system, run every report you can think of, pull all of the data out of it, get anything that you think might be helpful, manuscript history, things like that, data submissions from different topics, different countries, editor performance, user lists, your user lists will probably almost definitely transfer over as part of the transition. But any bit of data like that I would highly recommend that you pull. And you sort of pros and cons of this, and it's always a little scary because I like to do it right before you lose access. So you have as much data as possible. If you do it, you know, three or four months before you lose access, then you don't have to do it again at the very end to get as much as you can. So that's a great point. And then I think your second question is sort of what would transfer over essentially. I think it would depend a little on the system that you're going from and to. Usually you can get your full user list, but maybe not their statistics, not, you know, their, their reviewer numbers, how often they review how fast they review. Usually you would lose something like that. And then manuscripts, I've seen some submission systems that can have a like historical archive, but you couldn't say run a report on that or search it particularly well. So it would just sort of depend where you're going to and where you're coming from. But that's a great question. I have seen some submission systems that can do that. For example, I know that editorial manager can have legacy manuscripts, but you can't the way that you would normally like search a submission you just can't use. I don't believe you can use that functionality on that. But it can sort of be stored, but not necessarily used in the way that you would normally. Will you restate the question? Sorry. I believe the question. Are there other legacy preservation systems that can be preserved for a fee. And there might be third party systems that I'm not aware of that I could see would be helpful but if you have to go to a third site and pull that that data, at least you would have it. Even if it may be a little harder to get to, but I'm not aware of any particular service for that. Anybody else. Okay. Join me in thinking Lindsey again for presentation. So we currently don't have a meeting set up for February, but I've got some, I've got a full list of ideas. So what I'll say is just to stay on the lookout and we'll send out an invite into your email and you'll be notified the next time I have a meeting. Thanks.