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 nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

academic journal An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which Scholarly method, scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the ...

, almost always an online

electronic journal An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the dissemination, scr ...

(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 versi ...

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 re ...

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 to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

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 (:wiktionary:peer#Etymology 2, peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the ...

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

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

table of contents A table of contents (or simply contents, abbreviated as TOC), is a list usually part of the Book design#Front matter, front matter preceding the main text of a book or other written work containing the titles of the text's sections, sometimes with ...

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 ( Friedric ...

'' and ''

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

''. 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 JM ...

, 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 online disciplinary repository publishing preprints in all disciplines of the health sciences. It distributes papers in the areas of medicine and clinical research without charge to the reader. In Janua ...

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 was hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) until March 11, 2025, whe ...

and

PsyArXiv PsyArXiv is a preprint repository for the psychological sciences opened in September 2016 and officially launched in December 2016. It is hosted by the Center for Open Science. The preprint service was inspired by the arXiv repository. The servic ...

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. The journal was 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 Ame ...

'' 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 Studie ...

'', ''

'' and ''

Geometry and Topology ''Geometry & Topology'' is a peer-refereed, international mathematics research journal devoted to geometry and topology, and their applications. It is currently based at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom, and published by Mathematical S ...

'', all of which were overlays for

arXiv arXiv (pronounced as "archive"—the X represents the Chi (letter), 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 Scholarly pee ...

History

References

Further reading