ONLINE  FIRST  POLICY

The Editorial Board of Seminare. Learned Investigations applies an Online First publishing policy. This policy enables the online publication of final versions of articles (completed articles awaiting assignment to one of the forthcoming issues of the journal) before they are included in a specific volume and issue. This approach is commonly referred to as publish ahead of print, publish before print, or continuous publishing.

Articles published as Online First have completed the full peer-review, editorial, and language-editing process and have been finally accepted for publication.

1. Benefits

Online First provides clear benefits to researchers and all users of the journal’s online content. It enables access to the latest articles accepted for publication in Seminare.

Authors also benefit from a significant reduction in the time between completion of the editorial process and publication of the article. Their research findings therefore reach readers more quickly, allowing earlier use and dissemination of the article, including earlier citation.

2. Citations

Each article published as Online First may be cited using the date of its first online publication and its DOI (Digital Object Identifier). The DOI provides a persistent means of identifying articles published electronically, including after their subsequent assignment to a specific volume and issue.

Information such as the volume number, issue number, and page range is not assigned to Online First articles, as these details are established only when the article is included in a specific issue of the journal. Online First articles should therefore be cited as follows:

Jones, Richard, and Adam B. Smith. 2026. “Article Title.” Seminare. Published Online First, Month Day. https://doi.org/10.21852/sem.xxxx.

After the article has been assigned to a specific issue, subsequent citations may include the volume number, issue number, and page range, while retaining the same DOI:

Jones, Richard, and Adam B. Smith. 2026. “Article Title.” Seminare 47 (2): 11–17. https://doi.org/10.21852/sem.xxxx.

The DOI of each article is registered with Crossref, ensuring its persistent identification and enabling citations to remain linked to the article after it has been assigned to a specific issue.

3. Differences from the Final Issue Version

An article published as Online First is the final, accepted, and published version of the article. The Online First version and the version of the article after its assignment to a specific issue may differ in elements resulting from the final preparation of the issue, in particular the volume and issue number, the year of issue assignment, the page range, and other bibliographic and technical elements specific to that issue.

Assignment of the article to the final issue does not result in any change to its substantive scholarly content or DOI. Any corrections required after the first electronic publication are made in accordance with the Publishing Ethics Policy of Seminare and the journal’s rules governing corrections to published materials.

The electronic version of the article published on the OJS platform constitutes the final and authoritative version of the publication (version of record).

4. Assignment to the Final Issue

Once an Online First article has been assigned to its final issue and has received complete bibliographic information, such as the volume and issue number, year, and page range, it is moved from the Online First list to the relevant issue of the journal.

The article retains the same DOI, and citations using either the DOI or the complete bibliographic information refer to the same publication record.

Assignment of the article to a specific issue does not constitute republication. The date of first electronic publication remains the date on which the article was made available as Online First.

All Online First articles are published in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0), in accordance with the Open Access Policy of Seminare.