Electronic

Electronic articles are articles in scholarly journals or magazines that can be accessed via
electronic transmission. They are a specialized form of electronic document, with a specialized
content, purpose, format, metadata and availability – they consist of individual articles from
scholarly journals or magazines (and now sometimes popular magazines), they have the
purpose of providing material for academic research and study, they are formatted approximately
like printed journal articles, the metadata is entered into specialized databases, such as
the Directory of Open Access Journals as well as the databases for the discipline, and they are
predominantly available through academic libraries and special libraries, generally at a fixed
charge.
Electronic articles can be found in online-only journals (par excellence), but in the 21st century
they have also become common as online versions of articles that also appear in printed
journals. The practice of publishing of an electronic version of an article before it later appears in
print is sometimes called epub ahead of print (particularly in PubMed),[2][3] ahead of
print (AOP), article in press or article-in-press (AIP), or advanced online publication (AOP)
(for example, in the context of CrossRef).[4]
The version of record (VoR) represents the definitive form of the article. Electronic VoRs remain
largely stable, although a few types of changes may be made: most importantly, errors in the
VoR, whose corrections are announced by errata or corrigenda, are often corrected within an
electronic VoR itself, so that readers of the VoR will not be unnecessarily confused or misled,
and the VoR then makes reference to the erratum or corrigendum for clarity's sake. The other
class of changes is that if an author in the byline has had a legal name change since the VoR
was published, the byline of the electronic VoR may be updated to show their current name,
depending on each publisher's stated policy.
The term electronic articles can also be used for the electronic versions of less formal
publications, such as online archives, working paper archives from universities, government
agencies, private and public think tanks and institutes and private websites. In many academic
areas, specialized bibliographic databases are available to find their online content.
Most commercial sites are subscription-based or sell pay-per-view access. Many universities
subscribe to electronic journals to provide access to their students and faculty, sometimes other
people. An increasing number of journals are now available with open access, requiring no
subscription. Most working paper archives and articles on personal homepages are free, as are
collections in institutional repositories and subject repositories.
The most common formats of transmission are HTML, PDF and, in specialized fields like
mathematics and physics, TeX and PostScript.