Open access continuous publication

Many open access journals operate in a continuous publication (CP) mode where articles are posted online as soon as they have completed the production process in a fully citable form with a universal digital object identifier (DOI). At this time articles are free to view and download for all.

Some benefits of continuous publication are:

• Open accesss journals are often online only, therefore, with no annual page budget constraints, they are free to grow rapidly as the flow of articles accepted after peer review dictates.

• As there are no traditional issues to compile or print, the time to publication is often quicker than for print titles. 
• Special collections (special issues for continuous publication titles) don’t have to have a final close date, new research can be added to the collection indefinitely
  
  
• Once a continuous publication paper is published in journal which is indexed in PubMed Central, the article is sent to PubMed immediately and indexed within a week on average.

• Social media activity can be at the article-level. Articles are published as and when they are ready, so tweets can occur as frequently as articles are published rather than waiting on the issue publication.

As continuous publication articles aren’t continuously paginated, the universal digital object identifier (DOI) should be used for citations and can be easily handled with use of citation manager software. Note that CrossRef website resolves DOIs.

Check the ‘Latest Articles’ tab on the journal website for the latest published content. Articles are batched periodically (every month, quarter or year), and are then available on the ‘Archive’ tab on the journal website.