Refuge transitioning to a continous publication model (beginning with 38.2)

We have some exciting news to share! With this next issue of Refuge (38.2) we are transitioning to a continuous publication model. This means that articles will be published as soon as they make their way through the peer-review and production (copy-editing, typesetting) stages, rather than having to wait for the other articles in the same issue to be completed first. With continuous publication, issues will be populated with articles gradually and remain “open” until we decide to close them and start a new one. For special issues, articles can either continue to be published all together or they can come out one by one, depending on the wishes of our guest editors. 

The continuous publication model has been introduced by many academic journals recently to speed up the publication process of peer-reviewed articles, which is great news for both authors and readers. It will also distribute some of the workload on our end more evenly over a longer period of time. The introduction of a continuous publication model is also a reflection of the fact that in the digital publishing age, most readers now search for articles by keywords or theme(s) and read them at the individual article level, rather than as part of a (printed) volume.

What will change: Not much! The pagination for each article PDF will now restart with p. 1 rather than continuing from the previous article as was the case until now. 

So don’t forget to include the article’s unique DOI (Digital Object Identifier) in your citations - it is the easiest way to identify an article and to navigate to it digitally. Our indexing services will also be notified so they are aware of this change. Other than that, we will still continue to publish the same number of issues and articles (the maximum number we can publish is linked to our open access, no APCs funding structure). We will also post a list of FAQs on our website shortly.

You can also read this entry, along with our other news, in the latest Refuge newsletter.