About Advance online publication
About Advance Online Publication
- When are new articles published AOP?
- Can the AOP version of the article be considered definitive?
- Where does the DOI appear and how do I recognize the AOP version of an article?
- How can I use a DOI to find a paper?
- How do I use the DOI to cite an article?
- What is the 'official' publication date?
- Must I subscribe to the journal in order to read AOP articles?
All monthly Nature Reviews Journals (Nature Reviews Cancer, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Nature Reviews Genetics, Nature Reviews Immunology, Nature Reviews Microbiology, Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, Nature Reviews Neuroscience) offer Advance Online Publication (AOP) on their websites.
Each journal's website includes an AOP table of contents, in which papers are listed in order of publication date (beginning with the most recent). Each paper carries a digital object identifier (DOI), which serves as a unique electronic identification tag for that paper. As soon as the monthly issue is printed, papers will be removed from the AOP table of contents, assigned a page number and transferred to that issue's table of contents on the website. The DOI remains attached to the paper to provide a persistent identifier.
We believe that rapid online publication is a valuable service to both readers and contributors, and we encourage you to visit our sites often.
Frequently asked questions
- When are new articles published AOP?
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New articles are uploaded to the AOP section of our website throughout the month.
- Can the AOP version of the article be considered definitive?
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Yes. Different publishers have different policies, and some journals choose to publish unedited versions of articles on their websites. Our policy, however, is to publish only the final edited version of the paper. The paper is thus complete in every respect except that instead of having a volume/issue/page number as an identifier, it has a DOI (digital object identifier).
- Where does the DOI appear and how do I recognize the AOP version of an article?
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In the print journals and on the article PDFs, the DOI appears beneath the author affiliations. Online, the DOI also appears as part of the article citation at the top of the page. The AOP version of an article (which can be viewed online in HTML or PDF format) is identical to the final print and online version in every respect regarding content and presentation, except that instead of having a volume/issue/page number it has only the DOI as an identifier. It can be identified, however, by looking at the footer within the PDF file, which states "Advance Online Publication." For convenience, the PDF version of every AOP article is given a temporary pagination, beginning with page 1. This is unrelated to the final pagination of the printed article.
- How can I use a DOI to find a paper?
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There are two ways to use a DOI to find a paper:
- DOIs from other articles can be embedded into the linking coding of an article's reference section. In Nature journals these appear as "|Article|" in the reference sections. When |Article| is clicked it opens another browser window and takes you to the entrance page (often the abstract) for another article. Depending on the source of the article, this page can be on the Nature Publishing Group site or a site of another publisher. This service is enabled by CrossRef.
- If you know a DOI, you can insert it directly into your browser's location bar as follows. For the DOI 10.1038/nri1712, you would type: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nri1712. This will bring you to the entrance page of the desired article.
The material found on the entrance page (bibliographic data or abstract) is free to everyone. On that page, you will also find a link to the full text for that article. Clicking on that link will give you either the full text (for institutional subscribers) or a user login page, from which you can access the full-text article by entering your userID and password. For users who are not subscribers and who do not have a userID and password, many publishers offer document delivery from their websites.
- How do I use the DOI to cite an article?
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One advantage of the DOI system is that papers can be cited using a DOI only, before final pagination and print publication. The DOI is a persistent identifier, which remains with the article even after it is published in print. We recommend citing DOIs as follows: At the end of the reference citation, type the complete DOI (for example, Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 4, 887–891 (2005); doi:10.1038/nrd1878 .
- What is the 'official' publication date?
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Many journals, and most abstracting and indexing services (including Medline and Institute for Scientific Information) still cite the print date as the publication date. This is an evolving standard, however, and the trend now is for publishers to state both the 'Online Publication Date' and the 'Print Publication Date'. The Nature Publishing Group will continue to publish both dates for our own papers, and we hope that the scientific communities and abstracting and indexing services will recognize these dates.
For the time being, the reference lists of our papers will continue to follow the standard convention of citing by print publication date. Thus, there will be no immediate change to the reference format instructions in our Guides to Authors (but see below for how to cite papers that have not yet appeared in print). We expect, however, to review this policy regularly as community standards evolve.
For legal purposes (for example, establishing intellectual property rights), it is our assumption that online publication will constitute public disclosure. This is, however, for the courts to decide; our role as a publisher is to provide clear documentation of the publication history, online and in print.
- Must I subscribe to the journal in order to read AOP articles?
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Yes. While abstracts are freely available to anyone on our website, access to the full-text article requires a paid subscription or a site licence.
