An overlay journal or overlay ejournal is a type of

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

academic journal An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and d ...

, almost always an online

electronic journal An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and d ...

(ejournal), that does not produce its own content, but selects from texts that are already freely available online. While many overlay journals derive their content from

preprint In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset versio ...

servers, others, such as the ''Lund Medical Faculty Monthly'', contain mainly papers published by commercial publishers, but with links to self-archived preprint or

postprint A postprint is a digital draft of a research journal article ''after'' it has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication, but ''before'' it has been typeset and formatted by the journal. Related terminology A digital draft before peer rev ...

s when possible. The editors of an overlay journal locate suitable material from open access repositories and

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...

sources, read it, and evaluate its worth. This evaluation may take the form of the judgement of a single editor or editors, or a full

peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

process. Public validation of subsequently approved texts may take several forms. At its most formal, the editor may republish the article with explicit approval. Approval might take the form of an addition to the text or its

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

. Or the editor may simply link to the article, via the

table of contents A table of contents, usually headed simply Contents and abbreviated informally as TOC, is a list, usually found on a page before the start of a written work, of its chapter or section titles or brief descriptions with their commencing page number ...

of the overlay journal. An alternative approach is to link to articles already published in various open access ejournals, but adding value by grouping scattered articles together as a single themed issue of the overlay journal. Such themed issues allow the focussed coverage of relatively obscure or newly emerging topics. Episciences is an initiative by the Center for Direct Scientific Communication to host overlay journals. It hosts among others the computer science journals ''

Logical Methods in Computer Science ''Logical Methods in Computer Science'' (LMCS) is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering theoretical computer science and applied logic. It opened to submissions on September 1, 2004. The editor-in-chief is Stefan Milius ( Fried ...

'' and ''

Fundamenta Informaticae ''Fundamenta Informaticae'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering computer science. The editor-in-chief is Damian Niwiński. It was established in 1977 by the Polish Mathematical Society as Series IV of the '' Annales Societatis Mathemati ...

''. In 2019,

JMIR Publications The ''Journal of Medical Internet Research'' is a peer-reviewed open-access medical journal established in 1999 covering eHealth and "healthcare in the Internet age". The editors-in-chief are Gunther Eysenbach and Rita Kukafka. The publisher is ...

, an

publisher, announced the creation of a series of "superjournals", name
JMIRx (JMIRx.org)
which are overlay journals for preprint servers such as

medRxiv medRxiv (pronounced "med-archive") is an Internet site distributing unpublished eprints about health sciences. It distributes complete but unpublished manuscripts in the areas of medicine, clinical research, and related health sciences without c ...

bioRxiv bioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is an open access preprint repository for the biological sciences co-founded by John Inglis and Richard Sever in November 2013. It is hosted by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). As preprints, papers ...

and PsyArXiv.

History

The term 'overlay journal' was first coined by Paul Ginsparg in 1996. That same year, the journal ''

Physical Review ''Physical Review'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal established in 1893 by Edward Nichols. It publishes original research as well as scientific and literature reviews on all aspects of physics. It is published by the American Physical S ...

'' began to link to pre-prints that they had accepted, but not yet published. It was not until later that the first overlay journals were founded, including ''

Journal of High Energy Physics The ''Journal of High Energy Physics'' is a monthly peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering the field of high energy physics. It is published by Springer Science+Business Media on behalf of the International School for Advanced Stu ...

'', ''

'' and ''

Geometry and Topology In mathematics, geometry and topology is an umbrella term for the historically distinct disciplines of geometry and topology, as general frameworks allow both disciplines to be manipulated uniformly, most visibly in local to global theorems in Ri ...

'', all of which were overlays for

arXiv arXiv (pronounced "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of ...

History

References

Further reading