Academic journal editing services
Built for journals that understand style as part of editorial ethics and careEditorial stewardship for journals that believe editing is a key part of citational and social justice.
Ideas on Fire provides expert academic journal copyediting across the humanities, social sciences, arts, and interdisciplinary fields, working in close alignment with your journal’s standards, mission, and production realities.
Our global team of highly experienced editors supports faculty-led editorial teams and scholarly associations by reducing editorial burden, maintaining consistency across articles and issues, and safeguarding the clarity and integrity of complex, socially engaged scholarship.
We specialize in interdisciplinary research, where language choices matter, arguments cross disciplinary boundaries, and editorial care is inseparable from a journal’s values.
Copyediting is not an afterthought. It is part of how journals uphold their commitments to authors, readers, and the scholarly record itself.
Trusted by journal editors and editorial boards
Journal editing services
Monthly journal copyediting
For journals with rolling publication schedules or regular manuscript flow
Our monthly journal copyediting package provides consistent, high-quality editing for journals that publish articles on a rolling basis, including pre-print and continuous-publication models that still require meaningful editorial oversight.
This option is ideal for journals seeking a stable, ongoing editorial partner rather than ad hoc solutions.
Our service includes for each article:
- One round of in-text edits in Microsoft Word using Track Changes
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A style sheet to ensure consistency across the manuscript
Rate: USD $0.10 per word
Turn-around: 20 business days
Per-issue journal copyediting
Designed for special issues or issue-based publication schedules
Our per-issue journal copyediting package supports journals that publish complete issues at a time, including special issues with thematic or methodological complexity.
We copyedit all accepted manuscripts as a cohesive set, ensuring internal consistency of terminology, formatting, and style across the issue.
Our service includes for each article:
- One round of in-text edits in Microsoft Word using Track Changes
-
A style sheet to ensure consistency across the manuscript
Rate: USD $0.10 per word
Turn-around: 20 business days
Single article copyediting
Ideal for occasional manuscripts or overflow beyond internal capacity
This package is designed for journals that need professional copyediting for one or two articles without committing to an issue-wide or monthly workflow.
We copyedit all accepted manuscripts as a cohesive set, ensuring internal consistency of terminology, formatting, and style across the issue.
Our service includes for each article:
- One round of in-text edits in Microsoft Word using Track Changes
-
A style sheet to ensure consistency across the manuscript
Rate: USD $0.10 per word
Turn-around: 15 business days
Journal style guide
Designed to ensure continuity, clarity, and editorial responsibility over time
Our journal style guide service supports journals seeking to formalize, refine, or revise their editorial standards.
A clear, well-maintained style guide reduces repetitive decision-making, supports editorial transitions, and ensures consistency across issues, volumes, and editorial teams.
You can use your style guide to govern author submissions, post-acceptance copyediting, production preparation, article proofreading, and issue-level elements such as tables of contents, captions, audiovisual materials, and author bios.
We can create a new journal style guide from scratch or revise an existing one to reflect your journal’s evolving mission and scholarly priorities.
Rate: USD $2,495.00 flat rate
Turn-around: 6–8 weeks
How academic journal editing works
1. We assemble your team
Our CEO Cathy Hannabach personally assembles and leads your editorial team with the help of our editorial director—matching your journal with the right editors and project managers for its fields, editorial needs, and publishing context.
2. You deliver the manuscripts
You deliver the articles on the project start date via email or we retrieve them from your journal’s manuscript management platform.
3. Our team gets to work on the edit
Our team dives in, working together through each manuscript multiple times, shaping them for clarity, flow, and impact. We smooth grammar and punctuation, apply journal style, format citations, and ensure the writing speaks effectively to the journal's audiences. We also create a style sheet for each manuscript to guide the piece through the revision process and ensure each author's ideas shine through.
4. We conduct a final review
Our CEO and editorial director conduct a final review to ensure each article's argument and voice shine through clearly and consistently and that all copyediting elements have been addressed. We create the final files that present a unified Ideas on Fire edit with detailed tracked changes and revisions.
5. You receive the edited manuscripts
We return the edited manuscripts and style sheets via your preferred delivery method. You work with authors to review and implement changes, then move forward with typesetting and publication confident in the editorial integrity of the issue.
Recent journal copyediting partners
We’ve partnered with a wide variety of faculty-led journals, scholarly associations, and university press publications across the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences.
Feminist Anthropology
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience
Visual Anthropology Review
City & Society
Just Tech
Kujenga Amani
Anthropology of Work Review
Cultural Anthropology
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Anthropology & Education Quarterly
American Ethnologist
For editorial boards and publishing partners
For journals committed to social justice, interdisciplinary scholarship, and ethical publishing practices, copyediting is not a neutral technical step. It is part of how arguments are clarified, harms are avoided, and authors’ and communities' voices are respected.
Our work supports journal teams in upholding those commitments at the level of language, consistency, and care—especially in publishing environments increasingly shaped by cost-cutting pressures.
We partner with journals that view editing as integral to scholarly responsibility and community accountability.
Frequently asked questions: journal editing
What kind of journals do you edit?
We provide academic journal editing to publications in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences, particularly those published by scholarly associations and university presses.
See our full list of fields here.
We do not edit journals in STEM fields, business, or marketing.
Do you format citations?
Yes. Our copyediting service includes citation formatting and consistency checks.
We regularly work with Chicago, APA, MLA, ASA, Harvard, and publisher- or journal-specific styles.
How is my editing team assembled?
Each manuscript we work on is supported by a collaborative team throughout the entire publishing journey.
Our CEO Dr. Cathy Hannabach handpicks and leads each team, ensuring the exceptional quality our editing projects are known for.
This collaborative method provides your manuscript the benefit of multiple professional perspectives and Ideas on Fire’s unique, holistic publishing support.
Learn more about our outstanding team members on our team page.
Can I reschedule an editing project?
Yes. Please get in touch with us as soon as possible to adjust your start date.
How do I pay for services?
We will send you an invoice with the edited manuscripts, and payment is due within 15 days.
We accept credit/debit cards and bank transfers. We do not accept paper checks.
We are a registered vendor with hundreds of universities, publishers, and scholarly associations so the process is streamlined for payment.
If we are not already on your institution’s vendor list, we will register to enable direct payment.
Do you have any additional resources on scholarly publishing?
Tons! Check out our extensive scholarly publishing resource library.
And for those of you working on your first book, check out our comprehensive First Book Publishing Series, featuring advice from more than a dozen leading university presses.
Take the stress out of journal publishing
Join the dozens of journals that have chosen Ideas on Fire to handle their copyediting needs.