An overlay journal is an open access, quality-assured journal whose articles are held in one or more repositories. An overlay journal does not host the articles on the journal’s website but links back to the relevant article in an open repository or preprint server.
Overlay journals take advantage of the growing momentum for preprint sharing while leveraging the distributed nature of the web. They represent an innovative and cost effective alternative to traditional journals. The COAR Notify Initiative is developing the technical glue that will enable overlay journals to scale by connecting to articles in any compatible repository and preprint server.
Why publish in an overlay journal?
Why choose the overlay model for a new or existing journal?
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Related Resources
Case Study: Psicológica Overlay Journal Workflow
COAR’s October 2022 interview of Psicológica journal lead Pandelis Perakakis includes a step-by-step breakdown of that journal’s low-cost, replicable editorial workflow. Psicológica is a ‘do it yourself’ overlay journal with content hosted on the …
Investigating peer review overlay services
Today, a new journal in mathematics was launched by Timothy Gowers and Dan Kral. The journal, called ‘Advances in Combinatorics’, is an overlay journal, built entirely on articles contained in the arXiv repository. It …