Faster Access to New Knowledge through Continuous Publication

• Author: Øyvind Ravna
• Pages: 109-110

Faster Access to New Knowledge

through Continuous Publication

The digital revolution has changed society in many areas. Hardly anyone writes old-

fashioned letters any more, except perhaps the annual Christmas letter. One reason

is that email is much faster and cheaper. Official letters on paper are also almost a

thing of the past if we don’t count the ones that are considered so important that

they, strangely, are still printed on paper and posted to actual mail boxes.

Newspapers are falling prey to the same trend: digital solutions replace paper

editions, giving us fresh news at virtually the same time a story breaks. And we see

this trend in the realm of academic publications as well, where most journals now

have their own online editions. More and more journals have also been moving the

digital revolution another step forward by adopting the principles of Open Access,

where articles are published online, freely available for all readers, and subscription-

based funding is replaced by publication fees.

Arctic Review on Law and Politics went over to Open Access publishing in Januar y

2015. It has been a resounding success for the journal, which has enjoyed a

dramatically increased readership compared to the time when the main publishing

form was paper. Increased availability and broader distribution have also resulted in

more incoming manuscripts, which in turn gives the journal an opportunity for

stricter evaluation and thus publishing articles with higher quality.

Now it is time to take the consequences of the digital revolution an additional step

further. Until today, the journal maintained the tradition of publishing two issues per

year, a natural structure when it was printed on paper and delivered to subscribers by

mail. By publishing online and Open Access, however, there is no particular reason to

continue this tradition. From January 2017, two years after Arctic Review on Law and

Politics went Open Access, we celebrate the consequences of the digital revolution by

henceforth publishing articles as soon as they have been through the peer-review

process and approved by the editors; in other words, continuous publishing.

Continuous publishing will benefit both our authors and our readers. Authors will have

their articles published without unnecessar y delay,while readers will gain faster access

to new knowledge and the latest research on the High North and neighbouring areas,

which Arctic Review on Law and Politics aims to convey. In this way the journal will be

even more important and relevant for researchers, academics, NGOs and policy

makers.

Arctic Review on Law and Politics

Vol. 8, 2017, pp. 12

#2017 Ø. Ravna. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), allowing third parties to

copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any

purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.

Citation:

Ø

. Ravna. ‘‘FasterAccess to New Knowledge through Continuous Publication.’’ Arctic Review on Law and Politics,

Vol.8, 2017, pp. 12. http://dx.doi.org/10.23865/arctic.v8.675

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