Royal Society Publishing moves to Continuous Publication Model

Royal Society Publishing is converting all its journals, hosted on HighWire Press, to a continuous publication model. This initiative emphasizes the fact that the online version is the authoritative, most complete and up-to-date record, and ensures peer-reviewed papers can be cited immediately.

The introduction of a continuous publication model is a logical step forward from the current ‘publish ahead of print’ feature (known as FirstCite) and will provide many benefits for the scientific community: researchers will have full citation details available upon publication; an author’s published article will accumulate citations without delay; and journal impact factors won’t be skewed by articles whose FirstCite and issue publications span two different years. Continuous publication also means that page numbers will no longer appear within a citation; instead, each article will have its own CrossRef-compliant, unique identifier, found near the top right-hand margin on every page of an article.

The continuous publication model and the CrossRef formatted DOIs will not affect subscribing institutions - librarians will see no visible changes to their journal and package subscriptions. The continuous publication model will begin with the first issue of 2013 for all Royal Society journals (with the exception of Notes and Records and Biographical Memoirs which will remain unchanged).

Stuart Taylor, Commercial Director at the Royal Society said, "moving the Royal Society’s journals to a continuous publication model will increase the speed of research communication and help fulfil the Society’s mission to recognize, promote and support the very best science."

Royal Society Publishing is one of the first publishers on the HighWire platform to migrate its portfolio of scientific research journals to this model. Continuous publication is becoming increasingly common in the scientific community, with many journals such as Open Biology, BMJ and Nucleic Acids Research already using this model.

"HighWire’s mission is to assist scholarly societies distribute content to their readers as quickly as possible," said Tom Rump, HighWire’s Managing Director. "We support whole-heartedly the move to continuous publishing, to provide both cost and time savings for our publishers on the cutting edge of research."

For more information about Royal Society Publishing’s move to a continuous publication model, please visit: http://royalsocietypublishing.org/site/librarians/continuous_publication.xhtml