Why Your Journal's Website Is Quietly Losing Submissions

Most of us have submitted a paper somewhere. You find the site, click Submit, and hit a login wall. Then a form with seventeen required fields. Then a file upload that times out on your third attempt.

Each extra step between 'I want to submit' and 'submitted' loses authors. This holds true for every web form, not just journals. Make it harder, fewer people finish.

Journal websites are some of the worst offenders. We have seen submission workflows that require authors to create an account before they can even see the guidelines, upload files one at a time with no progress indicator, re-enter metadata the system should already know, and navigate three separate pages to complete one submission. Each of these is a door you are asking authors to push through. Most will not push through more than two.

Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, a growing share of researchers do most of their web browsing on phones. They read papers on phones. They check email on phones. They attempt manuscript submissions on phones too.

A submission workflow that breaks on mobile does more than inconvenience authors. It signals to a generation of researchers that the journal was not built with them in mind.

Worth checking: open your own journal's submission page on a phone, on mobile data. Try to get through it. Whatever frustrates you will frustrate a busy author twice as much.

Email notifications that stopped working. The author submits, but the confirmation email never arrives. The editor never gets notified. The submission sits in limbo for weeks until someone asks whether their paper was received. In our experience this is the most common failure, and it is almost always a mail server configuration issue nobody noticed.

SSL certificates that expired. The site shows a security warning. Authors see 'Not Secure' in their browser and leave. Some never come back.

OJS versions years out of date. Old OJS installations accumulate problems: plugins that stopped working, themes that break on new browsers, security holes that search engines penalise. Google notices. Authors notice faster.

DOIs that do not resolve. You registered them and paid for them, but the links are broken. Every dead DOI is a citation leading nowhere, plus a signal to indexing services that the journal is not maintaining its infrastructure.

It does not need to be fancy. It needs to work. Clear guidelines before login: authors should be able to read your submission requirements without creating an account first. As few steps as possible: every field, every page, every click is a chance to lose someone. Works on mobile: not 'technically loads on mobile', actually usable with tappable buttons, readable text, and file uploads that do not crash.

Immediate confirmation: the author should know within seconds that the submission went through. Show an on-screen confirmation and send an email. If either is missing, something is broken. Editor notifications that actually arrive: test this monthly. Send a test submission and confirm the editor gets notified. This takes five minutes and catches the most common failure mode.

You do not need us for this. Submit a test manuscript through your own workflow, on your phone, on mobile data (not wifi). Check that confirmation emails arrive, to the author and the editor. Click every DOI on your three most recent articles. Check your SSL certificate expiry date. Look at your OJS version and compare it to the current release.

If any of these fail, you have a submission problem. And every week it goes unfixed is another week of authors quietly going elsewhere.

Some of these are quick fixes. A mail server tweak, a certificate renewal, a plugin update. Others, like a full OJS migration or years of deferred maintenance, need someone who has done it before.

That is what we do. We build, run, and rescue journal websites and publishing platforms. If submissions are dropping and the cause is unclear, we will find it.