SEeB  ONLINE  FIRST  PUBLISHING  POLICY

1. Status of Online First Articles

Studia Ecologiae et Bioethicae (SEeB) publishes accepted articles online before they are assigned to a specific volume and issue.

Articles published as Online First have:

• completed external peer review;
• been revised by the authors;
• been formally accepted by the Editorial Team;
• undergone professional English-language editing;
• received a DOI.

They are therefore published and citable scholarly articles, not preprints or unreviewed manuscripts.

The Online First version contains substantially the same scholarly content as the version later published in a regular issue. It has not yet undergone final technical production by Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University Publishing House.

2. Differences from the Final Issue Version

The Online First version may differ from the final issue version in respect of:

• layout and typesetting;
• page numbering;
• volume and issue assignment;
• final technical preparation of figures, tables, and other graphic elements;
• implementation of certain digital-accessibility features;
• minor linguistic, typographical, technical, or author-approved corrections introduced during final production.

These differences do not normally affect the article’s principal arguments, research results, conclusions, or overall scholarly content.

3. Citation

An Online First article may be cited from the date of its first online publication.

Before assignment to a volume and issue, use the following form:
Jones, Richard, and Adam B. Smith. 2026. “Article Title.” Studia Ecologiae et Bioethicae. Online First. https://doi.org/10.21697/seb.xxxx.

In-text citation:
(Jones and Smith 2026)

After assignment to a regular issue, use the complete bibliographic details together with the same DOI:
Jones, Richard, and Adam B. Smith. 2026. “Article Title.” Studia Ecologiae et Bioethicae 24 (4): 11–17. https://doi.org/10.21697/seb.xxxx.

Detailed citation requirements are provided in the Citation Style Guide.

4. DOI and Transition to a Regular Issue

Each Online First article receives a DOI registered with Crossref.

The DOI remains unchanged when the article is assigned to a specific volume and issue. At that stage, the article’s metadata are updated to include the final volume, issue, pagination, and publication details.

Once final technical preparation, accessibility processing, typesetting, and author proof approval have been completed, the article is published as part of the assigned volume and issue and is removed from the Online First section.

5. Corrections

Because an Online First article is already a published scholarly work, any substantive error identified after its first online publication is handled in accordance with the journal’s corrections and publication-ethics procedures.

Routine production changes, including final typesetting, pagination, accessibility improvements, metadata completion, and minor author-approved corrections, may be incorporated into the final issue version.

6. Open Access and Licensing

All Online First articles are published in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-ND 4.0).

SEeB operates under the Diamond Open Access model. Authors are not charged submission fees, article processing charges, or publication fees, and readers may access Online First articles without subscription or payment.