Session Preview: Lean Editorial: Doing More with Less Across Peer Review and Editorial Operations
Written by 20 July 2026
Lean editorial is not about doing the same work with fewer people
Every new expectation in scholarly publishing lands somewhere in an editorial workflow.
A manuscript arrives, but it no longer needs only careful handling, reviewer invitations and a clear decision. It may also trigger metadata validation, research integrity screening, open-science questions, author identity verification, funder-compliance checks, data-policy requirements, reviewer-availability challenges and the everyday work of keeping authors, editors and reviewers properly informed.
None of these expectations is unreasonable. Most reflect priorities that authors, readers and journal communities genuinely value: trust, transparency, rigour, speed, fairness and a better experience for the people who give their time to scholarly communication. But each expectation creates operational work. It needs to be sequenced, owned, recorded, checked, escalated or explained.
That is why “lean editorial” is such an important phrase to handle carefully.
Used badly, it can become a euphemism for asking stretched teams to absorb more work with fewer people. Used well, it means something much more useful: designing editorial operations so that scarce human attention, existing systems, specialist partners and new tools are used where they genuinely add value.
The case for leaner editorial redesign is becoming hard to ignore. Hanson et al.’s 2024 paper, “The strain on scientific publishing,” argues that article output has grown far faster than the human capacity required to write, review and edit it. That pressure is not abstract. It shows up in delayed decisions, overdue editor tasks, declining reviewers, increased manuscript status enquiries, and increasing reliance on workarounds that were never designed to become permanent infrastructure.
Reviewer pressure makes the point particularly clearly. Routledge and Pariente, writing in PLOS Biology in 2025, describe a system in which invitations increasingly outweigh researcher capacity to complete reviews. Recent journal-level data from Morley et al. in PRiMER gives that pressure a tangible form: in one journal, reviewer invitation acceptance peaked at just over 56% in 2020, then fell to around 36% in 2024, with completion rates also declining. Inviting ten reviewers where three might once have been enough may be necessary in the short term. It is not, on its own, a strategy.
A leaner approach asks a different set of questions. Which manuscripts should reach external peer review at all? Which checks should happen earlier, before reviewer time is spent? Where can stronger pre-review editorial assessment, clearer scope control or refreshed reviewer records reduce avoidable chasing and repeated invitation rounds? Where are editors being asked to solve operational problems that could be handled through better workflow design or additional support?
Open science and transparency expectations add another layer. Howard et al.’s account of open science at Clinical Psychological Science is useful because it shows that transparency is not simply a policy preference; it can require new roles, checks and processes. Funder and open-access compliance create similar operational demands. Tools such as Jisc’s Open Policy Finder exist because policy requirements are complex enough to need structured navigation, while Jisc’s UKRI guidance reminds publishers that compliant routes should be easier for authors to understand and use. Reducing friction is not a soft service aim; it is part of making policy workable.
Research integrity has followed a similar path. Paper mills, systematic manipulation, duplicate submissions, image concerns and inappropriate AI use are no longer occasional exceptions that can be handled entirely outside the workflow. STM Integrity Hub and United2Act both show how much work is now going into practical tools, guidance and implementation support for integrity challenges that affect the whole sector.
AI-enabled workflow and integrity tools are also now part of editorial reality, not a future possibility. The practical question is how they are governed, where they add value, and where human judgement must remain explicit. The 2026 SSP Pulse Check suggests a community experimenting with AI while worrying, rightly, about ethics, privacy, quality and capacity. UKRIO’s 2025 guidance similarly frames AI as an integrity issue touching legal compliance, ethics, the research record, dissemination and critical thinking. In editorial terms, tools can help teams see more, sooner: patterns, missing information, possible manipulation, workflow risk. But outputs still have to be interpreted. Poorly placed automation creates friction. Well-governed automation creates capacity.
This is where society publishers and smaller teams have an important perspective to offer. Research Consulting’s 2025 white paper on the future of society publishing found that most societies still see publishing as central to their mission, even while many face declining revenues and pressure to adapt. Smaller publishers may lack the scale of larger commercial houses, but they are often closer to their communities, more alert to disciplinary context and more conscious of the trust they hold.
That is the thinking behind Lean Editorial: Doing More with Less Across Peer Review and Editorial Operations, taking place at the ALPSP Conference 2026 on Thursday 10 September, 11:20–12:05, in Deansgate Suite 3. Chaired by Kate Pearson of The Editorial Hub, a Silver Sponsor of ALPSP Conference 2026, the panel brings together Kimberly Bayley-Tweed, Publishing Operations Manager at Biochemical Society / Portland Press; Katherine Brown, Publishing Director at The Company of Biologists; and Dustin Smith, Co-founder and CEO of Hum to explore these questions in practical terms.
The discussion will stay close to the practical realities of editorial work: how teams evolve workflows, build capability, use vendors and tools selectively, manage integrity and open-science expectations, and decide where human judgement is essential.
That is the real promise of lean editorial: not doing everything faster, nor asking teams to stretch indefinitely, but making better operational choices so that journals can maintain rigour, protect author and reviewer experience, and remain realistic about the resources available.
Join us at Parallel Session 6b, Lean Editorial: Doing More with Less Across Peer Review and Editorial Operations on Thursday 10 September, 11:20–12:05, Deansgate Suite 3.
The Editorial Hub delivers expert‑led, scalable peer‑review and editorial office services with a personalised, people‑first approach. Founded in 2014, they are privately owned and fully independent. They combine deep expertise across leading editorial systems with a platform‑neutral, tool‑agnostic model; optimising client‑selected technologies to deliver exceptional, efficient and timely support. Their flexible delivery models provide tailored support at scale, with high‑quality, cost‑effective service and strong research integrity oversight.
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