For over 20 years, Clockwork Communications has provided publishing support to a range of professional organizations, including many specialty medical associations and scholarly societies. In the process of working with niche academic publishers and speaking with association leaders considering the launch of new journals, Clockwork’s President and founder, Deborah McNamara, began to notice a pattern. They were eager to publish, but many were struggling to come up with adequate resources to do so.
It led her to start thinking about ways organizations could maintain high-quality publications while managing costs, which blossomed into the idea of piloting a new journal model based on resource sharing. In 2024, Clockwork announced the development of its first collaborative multi-specialty peer-reviewed journals — the Journal of Nursing Specialties and the Canadian Journal of Medical Specialties. The Canadian Journal of Medical Specialties launched in 2025, using Scholastica’s peer review system and open access publishing platform, and the Journal of Nursing Specialties is still in development.
I decided to reach out to Deborah to learn more about these collaborative-style publications for Scholastica’s new “Community Conversations” blog series, where we invite Scholastica users to share new publishing initiatives and learnings. Below is a transcript of our discussion.
Many thanks to Deborah for taking the time for this interview!
Q&A with Deborah McNamara
Q. Can you give an overview of Clockwork Communications for those unfamiliar with you?
DM: Sure! We’re a small Canadian-based publishing agency… and I specify agency in that we’ve always taken a similar approach to how advertising or public relations agencies work. This is a bit different than other publishers where you go to them, you have an agreement, and they tell you how your journal runs. We instead provide the publishing expertise that our clients don’t have in-house, while working within their structural goals and with their teams. This creates a more collaborative approach with a lot more flexibility.
Q. What was your impetus for starting the collaborative journals?
DM: The main incentive for launching the collaborative model was that we had worked with many smaller specialty groups in the nursing and medical professions that were struggling to sustain their own journal, but they didn’t want to necessarily go to a full self-publishing model.
Post Covid, a lot of associations, especially in Canada where our numbers are smaller, were struggling with how to allocate resources and keep everything afloat in times when revenue was down and people were overloaded at work. We saw more and more groups that were either cutting corners on publishing or had decided that they just couldn’t sustain it from a financial or human resources perspective.
Publishers benefit from keeping multiple journals under a single roof – it seemed to me that the associations should also benefit from pooling their resources. So these journals were developed to allow the associations to gain by sharing.
It also removed the barrier to smaller groups. Big international companies generally want big journals. This is a barrier to entry for smaller specialties. For those that do get contracts with publishers more and more of them, in the last 5 years, are wondering if they can continue to publish in that model and many are feeling like small fish in a big pond. They know that the fees to publish sustain their journal – but that they also are a barrier to authors. Still others don’t publish at all and pay to participate in other journals that they don’t have a say in and where their members have less chance of being published.
I saw this all as meaning it was time for change.
Collaboration allows Clockwork to provide our management support and publishing platforms, such as Scholastica, with multiple associations sharing the costs. It combines the perks of hiring a publisher with the financial benefits of self-publishing.
Q. How does Clockwork’s new collaborative journals model work, and how did you get started?
DM: We tried to keep it as simple as possible. Participating associations pay a fixed annual fee that is based on the size of the organization. We tie participation costs into membership numbers. We also do not charge any fees to publish.
We’ve tried to align the costs with how much space members will, in theory, take up in the journal. But, if they need more or less space in some issues that’s also ok, there are no specific content thresholds. That is intentional as smaller groups often have content flow issues – it can be up and down and that also makes a solo journal hard to sustain.
Each specialty that joins gets a section in the journal for their content, including a letter from their associate editor, and that section can ebb and flow in size, depending on what’s happening in their specialty group.
We initially planned to start by launching a nursing multi-specialty journal as I could see a clear need for more publishing options in that area. As we were developing it one of our medical clients in Canada actually expressed interest in the model, so that spun off into the Canadian Journal of Medical Specialties which launched first – the nursing publication is still in the works. So, that goes to show that you just never know how quickly an idea will take off.
Q. How do you handle calls for papers in the collaborative publishing model? And how do you handle editor recruitment?
DM: The main journal website will always encourage people to submit. But generally, each specialty group will use its databases to reach out to members and encourage people to submit. They also generally handle editor recruitment.
We decided to leave that outreach to the associations because they have a stronger relationship with their own communities, but we provide support as needed. Clockwork manages the whole publishing side of the journal and we support peer review through each specialty’s associate editor. It is up to them if they want to do invited submissions or call outs to their membership.
All member associations also have the option of participating in a supplement to publish their annual meeting abstracts. That was something I noticed early on was a big draw for smaller groups as it is so important for attracting top speakers. Fees for that option are based on the amount of content they need to publish. We try to keep everything priced to scale to ensure it is always accessible.
Q. I don’t think I’ve heard of anything quite like this. How did you come up with the model concept?
DM: I swear the idea came to me at like three o’clock in the morning… or maybe it just felt that way. I’ve been self-employed most of my life, so I love new projects. Nine times out of ten, most of the projects I develop are client side, so they’ll come to me with a one-off problem to fix and I build a system and workflow to address their in-house challenges. This project was unique to me in that it offered a solution to a bigger group challenge. I was a little surprised that I didn’t find groups already doing this, but I am not afraid of new things so I thought it would be worth testing out.
The turnaround time to bring associations on board is slow. The wheels turn slowly in this world. But the amount of interest I am seeing is very promising. Many people I have spoken to comment that this checks “all their boxes” in a way that no other model does. So, I am excited for what the future holds.
Q. Do you have a cap on how many associations can participate in a collaborative journal?
DM: I’ve had multiple people ask me that, and right now I say that I see no reason for a limit. I think if we grew beyond a certain size, we might split into multiple publications. But I don’t see any reason to limit it as we ensure that no matter how many sections the journal has it is easy for readers to jump straight to their own if they like.
And a lot of people like the idea of giving their members access to other specialties’ research. So more is better from that perspective. There’s quite a lot of cross-over in the medical world, but each society tends to operate in a bit of a silo. Pathologists don’t necessarily see the newest oncology research and so forth. They generally don’t browse each other’s journals, because they don’t have easy access to them. Whereas, in the collaborative journal model every participating specialty gets to read the whole journal if they wish to.
I think this sharing of information could create opportunities for new cross-specialty collaboration, which really excites me.
Q. How does your open access model work?
DM: All regular issues are members-only access for the first six months and then we make it fully open access online. Abstracts are open access right away.
We host our online content via Scholastica, and we love the discoverability benefits of articles getting picked up by Google Scholar. It gets the content out there. So, that initial embargo period means societies get to provide extra value to their members and then open access after six months ensures the research makes it to a public forum. It offers the best of both worlds.
Q. What do you think are the unique challenges specialty associations face in general, and particularly outside of the US?
DM: Speaking for Canada, our research, unfortunately, is not as well funded, because, again, we don’t have as many people. But that’s changing, and one of the things we learned during Covid was that we need to be doing more here. All of a sudden we were cut off from the rest of the world. I don’t think Canadian researchers and practitioners have had enough opportunities to have their voices heard and Canadian standards of practice don’t really make it into American journals. For the Canadian Journal of Medical Specialties, I think the Canadian aspect is a big part of what makes associations here want to join, because it is Canadian. But we are also available to international groups and have a strategy to include those sections in the journal if needed.
For a long time, I think we considered Canadian journals to be inferior. But now we are realizing that they are unique and important. Of course, at the end of the day all research from around the world matters.
Q. What’s your call to action for anyone reading this who wants to get involved in either journal, particularly the Journal of Nursing Specialties now in development?
DM: For both medical and nursing groups, I would encourage them to consider the value of publishing and any way that they can make it more accessible to their members. It can feel daunting, but we are here to help and none of our journals require a long-term commitment, so it is easy to test the waters. It is time, I think, to step outside the box of how we have done things in the past.
The nursing journal is close to my heart as I began my publishing career as a nurse editor and I really want to see more nursing publishing! Obviously, there are a lot of barriers. Nurses don’t have as much time and don’t have as much funding, and that is a real challenge. We tried to keep the unique challenges in mind when developing our nursing journal – including things like offering writing support. That is something that is not usually done at a journal level, but it’s something that successful nursing journals tend to provide. So, depending on how many members you have, participants in our nursing journal get a certain number of hours of support from a nurse with experience in writing, and they can allocate it to authors as they choose.
The other thing is, we will work with organizations to help them attract authors. If they want to offer a writing award, for example, and they find somebody to sponsor it, they can do that. Anything they want to do to help encourage nurse publishing, we are on board with helping, because it’s an area that I feel needs to be sustained, and it’s overly neglected. It’s a global challenge.
I love that in this model we can grow together. Everyone has skin in the game and so everyone benefits from its success. This drives us in a very different way than other models, and allows us to pivot quickly to address any challenges, so I’m very excited about its potential.
Thanks again to Deborah for taking the time for this interview!
Interested in reading more Scholastica community conversation series blog posts? Check out our last interview with Dr. Vinciya Pandian, Editor-in-Chief of ORL - Head and Neck Nursing about their experience transitioning to all digital publishing.
