How do you set personal goals and objectives? Do you use achievement goals or habit goals? Are you able to successfully balance work and personal commitments? How do you track your time so that you can become more efficient and effective in the future?

There’s a big difference between management and leadership. Managers oversee their team’s work, making sure that targets are met. Leaders provide a vision and need to influence key stakeholders, often outside of their direct reporting lines, to achieve common goals. I can help you to develop your leadership style and to develop communication plans that inspire and motivate.

How can you get your voice heard by senior stakeholders? How can your team help you to manage upwards? Do you have an internal communication plan in place to help share the key messages with your line manager and wider stakeholders? Are you able to communicate effectively with academic stakeholders so that they trust and listen to your opinion?

Do you have the right KPIs in place to ensure that problems are spotted early and that levers can be pulled to grow the portfolio? It’s important to measure the right KPIs and to create a culture where team members proactively deal with problems while keeping you properly informed.

Publishers are under increasing financial pressure, while working in an environment that requires them to do more to combat bad actors. Under pay-to-publish open-access business models revenue per article is often lower than for subscription journals. Teams need to learn to adapt to this environment, which can be a significant leadership challenge.

Nothing beats an in-person meeting, but there will likely be limited opportunities to attend conferences within a calendar year. On the other hand, investing time into building a network using social media, for example, can help you to identify collaborations and future opportunities.

Leaders in all industries need to be credible, but that’s especially important in scholarly publishing where trust is the cornerstone of everything we do. In this session we will discuss how to build trust with a diverse range of stakeholders (academics, funders, institutions, commercial partners), which often have different demands and expectations.

We work in scholarly publishing because we want to make a positive contribution to the communities we serve. To do that, we need to explain the value we add and communicate a vision for the future that excites and inspires. In this session we will talk through your vision for your organisation and how best to communicate it internally and externally.

Publishers of all kinds are developing a portfolio strategy to allow them to provide a home for every publishable paper. This is important in an open access environment where the revenue per published article is often lower than under a subscription model. In this session we will discuss how your current portfolio could be developed so that it attracts more high quality submissions and publishes more articles.

One of the biggest investments a publisher can make is to launch new journals. Good planning is essential to reduce the time to recover the initial financial investment. In this session we will discuss what makes a good journal proposal and also cover the process of launching a journal successfully.

Portfolio strategies work best when the transfer of rejected manuscripts from one journal in the portfolio to another happens effectively and efficiently. To do this, editorial teams need to collaborate to provide the best possible author experience, while also maintaining appropriate levels of editorial independence. Transfer strategies are difficult to implement; I will coach you on how to avoid common pitfalls and make the the transfer process a success.

The best journals have a positive impact on the communities they serve and on wider society. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been embraced by publishers looking to inspire their authors and their readers. How can your publishing programme have maximum societal impact?

Every publisher needs a long term open access strategy as well as tactical plans that the team can implement throughout the year. The global open access transition is at a critical juncture and it’s more important than ever to plan for different scenarios. In this coaching session we will talk through recent industry trends and how your organisation can best respond to them.

Publishers are facing a deluge of badly designed or outright fraudulent research; they need to devote more resources to preserve the integrity of the version of record. We will discuss current challenges and how best to mitigate against the threat of paper mills and other bad actors for your journals programme.

Publishers are under increasing financial pressure and many are looking for different ways to monetise their publishing programme beyond institutional subscription revenues, open access APCs, and commercial advertising. In this session we will discuss how to diversify revenues through, for example, events, jobs boards, branded content, and digital marketing.

Branded journal portfolios have proven to be successful editorially and commercially. In this session we will discuss how journal brands can be positioned and developed, to make them more appealing to researchers, librarians, funders, and commercial partners.

The best editors have a clear editorial vision for their journal, including how it can operate to benefit the community it serves. In this coaching discussion we will talk through your vision for the journal you lead and debate ways in which it could be improved. We will also discuss how to go about writing Editorials so that readers understand the journal’s focus and mission.

This coaching session focuses on empowering scholarly journal editors to create a proactive commissioning strategy for primary research. Learn to plan impactful special issues and thematic collections that attract high quality research, and understand the potential pitfalls of a guest editor model. We will also discuss other proactive approaches including: (1) issuing calls for papers timed with conferences; (2) identifying key opinion leaders, especially those who publish with competitor journals; (3) using bibliometric tools to identify hot topics.

Keeping academic editors onside is important, but this is no easy task. Measuring editor performance to identify trouble spots is not straightforward, especially when the editors are academic volunteers. How can you better communicate with your editors and incentivise them? What are the core messages that you need to get across? What’s the best way to run an editorial board meeting? Impactful journals are created when editors and publishers work together collegiately.

Whether we like it or not, academics care about impact factors and therefore so do (most) journal editors. There are many urban myths about impact factors and also some easy ways to attract citations. We can talk through how to improve your journal’s impact factor using legitimate techniques.

Every editor has to deal with “difficult cases”. It’s worth thinking through how to prevent these from occurring in the first place and to create, in advance, a framework for handling problems related to authorship disputes, plagiarism, image manipulation, retractions etc.

In this session we will discuss how recent developments in scholarly publishing are affecting your editorial team now and in the future. For example, open access and the rise of AI have changed the way journals are published, and the expectations authors have of journal editors.

Journals are more than mere repositories for primary research. They can also shape a field by commissioning key opinion leaders to write about cutting edge topics that matter to the communities that the editors serve. I have commissioned hundreds of review and opinion pieces and also ran the Nature Reviews portfolio. I can help you to build a commissioning strategy that works.

This module explores the foundational principles of peer review, focusing on how to select qualified reviewers and manage the logistical workflow with efficiency and integrity. It provides editors with practical strategies to evaluate reviewer feedback, navigate conflicting opinions, and communicate decisions clearly to authors. Finally, the training emphasises the editor's role in upholding ethical standards and fostering a constructive, transparent culture within the scholarly community.