“Elsevier Introduces Article-Based Publishing to Increase Publication Speed”:

Elsevier, the world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and solutions, announced today the launch of Article-Based Publishing — a new publishing model that publishes articles as final and citable without needing to wait until a journal issue is complete. With an increasing focus on online publishing, there is a growing need for innovative publication models geared towards individual articles instead of the print-based issue model. Article-Based Publishing is the assigning of final citation data on an article-by-article basis, decoupled from the compilation of the journal issue itself.

“Article-Based Publishing is major step forward in publishing. Now the article is published in its final form within just a few weeks after acceptance, which provides the journal an important competitive advantage,” said Professor René Janssen, Editor of Organic Electronics. “Authors will be equally pleased to see the results of their research published sooner.”

For centuries, academic articles have been published in journals, issue by issue. While this practice has ensured organized citation information, it has also created boundaries for the timing of each published article. Now, Article-Based Publishing makes it possible to publish articles in their final form, with volume, issue and page numbers, before the entire issue is finalised. This new way of publishing speeds up the publication of articles by an average of 7 weeks.

Let us just say “welcome to the club”.