Yes. When a journal goes from draft to published for the first time, everyone who follows you gets a notification saying you published a new journal, with a link to it. It lands in their UNI notifications, the bell in the navigation bar.
That is the whole of it, and the limits are worth knowing.
It is your followers, and only on the first publish
- The people notified are the ones following your profile, not the people following the journal itself. Following a journal produces nothing when it is updated.
- It fires once, on the move from draft to published. Editing a published journal and pressing Publish again sends nothing, however large the rewrite. If you want readers to know about a substantial revision, you have to tell them yourself.
- You are not notified. There is no confirmation to you that publishing worked, by notification or by email. The status chip in the editor turning to Published is your confirmation: Reading the journal editor's status label.
No email is sent because you published
Nobody is emailed on account of your publishing. Your followers get the in-app notification, and if they have turned on browser notifications for UNI it is bundled into one daily summary rather than arriving on its own.
Some followers may separately receive a daily activity email covering new work from people they follow. That is a digest they opted into, it goes out on its own schedule, and it is not triggered by you.
The one time UNI does email about a journal is when the team features it editorially. That email goes to you, the author, and not to your followers, and it is a separate event from publishing.
What else happens the moment you publish
Publishing is what makes the piece exist publicly, so several things start at once:
- It appears on the journals feed and on your profile.
- Its web address is created and fixed permanently. See Your journal's web address is fixed the first time you publish.
- It becomes findable in UNI search.
- Search engines are told the page exists.
None of that is instant to the second. If your journal is not showing on a listing page right away, give it a few minutes before assuming something has gone wrong.