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),
ahead of print (
AOP),
article in press or
article-in-press (
AIP), or
advanced online publication (
AOP) (for example, in the context of
CrossRef). 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. ==See also==