IJESTM Journal Platform

01The problem

Build a production-grade journal platform that drives the full manuscript lifecycle, submission, double-blind peer review, editorial decisions, and DOI publication, while staying discoverable to academic search engines.

Academic journals must run a rigorous multi-role editorial pipeline and emit strict scholarly metadata for indexing, all while keeping the public reading experience fast and distraction-free.

02What I built

Built a Node.js/Express and MySQL backend with JWT-secured RBAC and a Socket.io notification layer driving the full submission-to-publication workflow, paired with a Vite/React frontend that prerenders Google Scholar metadata for discoverability.

• Role-based access control across five roles (visitor, author, reviewer, editor, admin), enforced by granular middleware down to per-paper ownership and reviewer-assignment checks
• JWT authentication with refresh tokens, bcrypt password hashing, email verification, and password reset, hardened with Helmet, rate limiting, and server-side request validation
• Complete double-blind peer-review workflow: manuscript submission, reviewer invitations via tokenized email links, autosaved review drafts, editorial decisions, and versioned revision tracking
• Real-time notifications over Socket.io alongside transactional email (Nodemailer) for paper status changes, new submissions, and review invitations
• 55+ RESTful endpoints over a 13-table relational MySQL schema, with Multer file uploads, PDF/DOCX parsing, DOI assignment on publish, and view/download metrics
• SEO-first React frontend with Google Scholar prerendering and structured metadata to rank research content in academic search

03The hard part

Access is enforced down to per-paper ownership and reviewer assignment, not just by role.

04Results

API Endpoints

55+

User Roles

5 (RBAC)

Status

Live

05Stack

• React
• Vite
• Node.js
• Express
• MySQL
• JWT
• Socket.io
• Nodemailer
• Tailwind CSS