Online Publication Through iFirst

What is iFirst?
iFirst is Taylor & Francis’ proprietary system for publishing journal articles online almost immediately after author proofs have been corrected, so making New Knowledge available to the research community in the shortest possible time.

Articles appear exactly as they would in the journal’s final online and print edition, with the single difference that ‘page spans’ are not included – although we plan to introduce this in the near future!

All subscribers with electronic access to a journal can access iFirst articles.

What are the benefits?
iFirst reduces the time from article submission to publication – sometimes by several weeks. This is a great asset in the Natural Sciences, where publishing an article even 2 or 3 days faster than another journal can assure priority of discovery, and so deliver competitive advantage.

iFirst also eliminates the problem of the backlog: accepted but unpublished papers. These papers can be published online through iFirst as soon as the production process is complete, ensuring submission-to-publication times are foreshortened, and assuaging author concerns about undue delay.

Does iFirst increase citation levels?
Each iFirst article is given a unique number, known as a Digital Object Identifier or DOI (www.doi.org). This can be used by authors to reference iFirst articles, and by CrossRef (www.crossref.org) to hyperlink to iFirst articles. DOIs are persistent – they will always direct readers back to the definitive version of an article, at first in iFirst and subsequently in the online journal issue.

Through DOIs, iFirst articles can be cited. Does this extend the citation window, and so increase Impact Factor? The short answer is ‘Yes’!

Looking forward
We continue to develop iFirst and plan to enhance the system during 2007. We are already publishing online articles and issues through iFirst with less frequent print editions. We plan to incorporate pagination, as noted above.