Publishing Platform for Four Peer-Reviewed Journals

A scholarly journal is not a document pipeline. It is a queue of manuscripts, each sitting at a different point in a process that involves people who must not see each other's work. A reviewer must see what they were assigned and nothing else. An editor needs the whole picture. An author needs to know where theirs has got to, without being shown the parts of the process outside their role.

Two languages run through all of it. An Arabic paper and an English paper sit in the same issue of the same journal, and a bibliography can mix both scripts inside a single entry list.

One system carries a manuscript from a public submission form, through reviewer assignment and peer review, to an editorial decision, into an issue, and out as a published article with its citation metadata attached. Four roles work in it (author, reviewer, editor and special-issue coordinator) and each sees a different, legitimate view of the same manuscript.

The author-facing history is deliberately not the editorial one. A rejection reaches the author as “Not Accepted for Publication”, and the internal scheduling state is folded into “Accepted”, because an author waiting on an issue does not need to watch it being built. The list of states is not frozen in code either: editors add their own, and retiring one leaves it standing on every manuscript that already passed through it, so a history is never rewritten underneath a reader.

Direction is decided per line rather than per page, so a bibliography mixing Arabic and English sets each entry in its own. A Crossref 5.3.1 deposit pipeline and Zenodo preservation are built and wired, and the deposit host is fixed so local tests or stray configuration cannot register a test document with Crossref. Publication does not depend on any of it: if the deposit, the archive copy or the notification email fails, the article still publishes and the failure is written onto the manuscript.

Of 71 capabilities documented for the publisher, 60 are standard or configurable, changeable without a developer. That flexibility keeps the ongoing cost of running the platform down, and it was engineered deliberately.