The current COVID-19 pandemic underscores the importance of having seamless remote working methods whenever in-person contact is not a feasible option. But an international crisis isn’t the only reason to go digital. Authors and editors might have a whole host of other reasons for it: lack of childcare; inability to travel due to medical complications; an upcoming family event that necessitates being elsewhere; and so on.
Here’s the good news: Whether you’re looking to hold a conference, give a lecture, or supervise journal staff, the age of technology makes it easy to do so from the comfort of your own home!
One of the handiest tools out there is Zoom, which has video calling and allows the host to share their computer screen with others on the call; that means face-to-face interaction can still happen, even if each person is in a different place. Zoom is perfect for large-scale virtual events, such as conference speeches or staff meetings for hundreds of journal employees—its features allow up to 500 participants at once!
If you’re still looking for face-to-face interaction but don’t have quite as many participants, Skype and BlueJeans video calling services are both useful solutions. They can allow one-on-one meetings (between a journal author and editor, for example) and smaller group meetings (for instance, a staff meeting that only the managing editors of a journal need to attend). Depending on your needs, both offer video calling and screensharing; the latter is perfect for activities like demonstrating new journal features or new editing software.
If you’re a journal leader looking to give a virtual seminar to numerous authors, peer reviewers, editors, or editorial staff members in different locations around the country (or even around the globe), numerous programs are at your disposal to host webinars. These platforms (LiveStorm, Demio, and ClickMeeting, just to name a few) usually allow recording of the live meeting, so anyone who is unable to join live can listen to and/or view the playback whenever they are able. Speakers might go this route if they want to discuss a new trend in publishing via PowerPoint slides (pertaining to topics like peer review efficiency, the move toward open access journals, or preprint servers), but they don’t necessarily expect a need for multiple intricate face-to-face interactions.
Of course, these kinds of digital methods do come with disadvantages when compared to in-person meetings—the biggest one probably being user friendliness. Many digital tools are designed to be easy to use, even if you’re not a computer or Internet wiz. Still, technology is fickle—so before embarking on a virtual adventure, make sure your entire journal staff is appropriately trained on how to use all of the relevant features in any given program. I would also strongly recommend testing these platforms out in-house before your first Internet-based meeting or conference takes place. That way, if any kinks need to be ironed out, you’ll know before it starts to disrupt any workflow.
As we are seeing with the COVID-19 pandemic, training journal staff on digital meeting methods isn’t a choice anymore—it’s a necessary part of keeping publishing operations effectively up and running. So, start today by planning future digital meetings and conferences instead of in-person ones, even if you don’t expect to always need them!
