IJTAHC Moving to Continuous Publication Model from 2021

From 2021 IJTAHC will be moving from the current issue-based model of publication to a continuous publication model. This means that, rather than articles being published on FirstView prior to being assigned to a journal issue as they currently are, papers accepted for publication in IJTAHC will be published as soon as possible after acceptance in one continuous annual volume. This removes the requirement for FirstView and also for journal issues in their current form.

Given that the journal has been accessible online-only for many years, and acknowledging issue-based publishing as essentially a hold-over from the times of print publication, we feel that the move to continuous publication will be a natural evolution for many journals in the near future, as it now is for IJTAHC. There are significant benefits to publishing articles in their final version-of-record form as soon as they are ready for publication, including rapid article access for readers, and also quicker and less ambiguous citations, as final citation details for a paper are known immediately after publication, rather than changing once a paper is published in a journal issue. For authors it will also mean a shorter time before their article is published in its ‘final’ state, rather than waiting to be assigned to an issue. Many journals currently published by Cambridge University Press, and other publishers, use this model or have recently switched, and we would certainly expect more to follow in future given the benefits and fit with the online, digital way in which academic research is now distributed and read.

Little will change from the point of view of authors in the journal; the submission and peer review processes will remain exactly the same. For readers, papers will continue to be easily accessible in the ‘Latest Volume’ page for the journal. Under a continuous model papers will also be identified by consecutive ‘e numbers’ based on the order of publication, rather than ordered by page number in issues.

We will also continue to use bespoke functionality of the journal website in order to group papers together thematically, so virtual Special Issues will still be published, and collections such as those for Policy Forum or Method papers will continue to help readers by grouping related papers together.