CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: version of record

  • What Is an Academic Journal? Definition and How It Works

    An academic journal (also called a scholarly journal) is a periodical publication that disseminates original research and scholarship within a discipline, where submissions are quality-controlled through peer review before publication. It is the primary formal channel by which new findings enter the permanent scholarly record, and it is distinguished from a magazine or trade publication by its peer-reviewed, citable and archival nature.

    This article defines the academic journal, explains how peer review and editorial governance work, and clarifies the supporting concepts — the ISSN, volumes and issues, the version of record, and open-access versus subscription publishing.

    Peer review: the quality gate

    The defining feature of a scholarly journal is peer review, the process by which independent experts in the field evaluate a submitted manuscript before it is accepted. Reviewers assess the soundness of the methods, the validity of the conclusions, the originality of the contribution and the clarity of the reporting, and they recommend acceptance, revision or rejection. Peer review is the mechanism that gives journal articles their authority: a published, peer-reviewed paper has passed independent scrutiny, even though the process is imperfect and varies between journals.

    Common models include single-anonymised review (reviewers know the authors), double-anonymised review (neither party knows the other), and increasingly open or transparent review where reports are published alongside the article.

    The editorial board and editorial governance

    A journal is led by an editor (often an editor-in-chief) supported by an editorial board of subject experts who set scope and standards, oversee the review process, and uphold the journal’s editorial policies and research-integrity commitments. The editorial board’s standing is a key signal of a journal’s credibility, and its members typically handle or coordinate the peer review of submissions within their areas of expertise.

    The ISSN, volumes and issues

    Each journal is identified by an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number), the standard identifier for serial publications, with separate ISSNs commonly assigned to print and electronic versions. Content is organised into volumes (usually one per year) and issues (instalments within a volume), giving every article a stable bibliographic location. Increasingly, individual articles also carry a DOI so they can be cited and resolved reliably regardless of issue structure.

    Element Role
    ISSN Standard identifier for the journal as a serial
    Volume An annual (typically) grouping of issues
    Issue An instalment of articles within a volume
    DOI Persistent identifier for each individual article

    The version of record

    The version of record is the final, formally published, citable version of an article as it appears in the journal, after peer review, copy-editing and typesetting. It is distinct from earlier forms such as the submitted manuscript (preprint) and the accepted manuscript. The version of record is what the journal commits to preserving and what carries the article’s official metadata and identifiers. Authors navigating these versions and their re-use rights will find guidance on our for-authors page.

    Open access versus subscription

    Journals differ in how readers gain access. Under the traditional subscription model, institutions or individuals pay to read, and access is gated behind a paywall. Under open access, articles are free to read, with publishing costs sometimes met through article-processing charges or other funding arrangements. Many journals operate hybrid or transformative models. The access model affects who can read research but does not, in itself, determine its quality, which is governed by peer review and editorial standards.

    Journals sit within a wider ecosystem of research information systems and contributor frameworks such as the CRediT taxonomy, which records who did what on a published paper. Definitions of journal-related terms are maintained in the CASRAI dictionary. The internal anatomy of a journal article is covered in our companion piece on the IMRaD structure.

    Frequently asked questions

    What makes a journal “academic” rather than a magazine?

    An academic journal publishes original research that has passed independent peer review, is governed by an editorial board, and is intended to be cited and preserved as part of the scholarly record — characteristics that general magazines and trade publications lack.

    What is an ISSN?

    An ISSN is the International Standard Serial Number, a standardised identifier for a serial publication such as a journal. Print and electronic editions of the same journal usually have separate ISSNs.

    Is the version of record the same as the accepted manuscript?

    No. The accepted manuscript is the author’s version after peer review but before journal production. The version of record is the final, copy-edited, typeset article published by the journal, and it is the authoritative citable form.

    Does open access mean lower quality?

    No. The access model determines who can read an article, not whether it was peer reviewed. Quality is governed by peer review and editorial standards, which apply across both open-access and subscription journals.

  • Preprints and peer review: how the version of record fits together

    A single piece of research now commonly exists in three or four forms at the same time: a preprint posted before review, an accepted manuscript that has passed review but not yet been typeset, and the final published version of record — sometimes with a later corrected or updated version on top. Readers, and even authors, routinely confuse them, and citing the wrong one can misrepresent what was actually validated. This article sets out what each version is and how peer review sits between them. It builds on the broader taxonomy in the research-outputs domain and pairs with the side-by-side explainer at preprint versus published article.

    The versions, in order

    The preprint

    A preprint is a complete research manuscript posted to a public server — arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, SSRN, and many others — before, or in parallel with, formal peer review. Its defining feature is speed and openness: it makes findings available immediately and citable via a persistent identifier, usually a DOI, without waiting for a journal’s review cycle. Its defining limitation is the flip side of the same coin: a preprint has not been through independent peer review, so its claims have not been externally vetted. A preprint is a legitimate, citable output — not a lesser draft — but it carries a different epistemic status from a reviewed article, and that status must be made clear wherever it is used.

    Peer review: the step between

    Between the preprint and the published article sits peer review — independent evaluation by qualified reviewers, organised by a journal editor, which may accept, reject, or (most often) require revision. Peer review is not a guarantee of correctness; it is a quality-control and improvement process. What it changes is the manuscript’s standing: a reviewed and accepted article carries the journal’s editorial endorsement that the work met its standards, which a preprint does not. Understanding this is the key to the whole picture — the versions differ mainly in what has happened to them, and peer review is the event that separates the unreviewed preprint from the validated article.

    The accepted manuscript (postprint)

    Once peer review concludes and the journal accepts the paper, the author’s final reviewed-and-revised file is the accepted manuscript, often called the postprint or author-accepted manuscript (AAM). It contains the intellectual content that passed review but lacks the publisher’s copy-editing, typesetting, and final pagination. The accepted manuscript is the version most commonly self-archived in institutional repositories under green open access, frequently after an embargo. It is content-equivalent to the published article in its claims, but it is not the citable, formatted final object.

    The version of record

    The version of record (VoR) is the final, published, formally citable version: copy-edited, typeset, paginated, assigned its DOI, and lodged with the publisher as the authoritative instance of the work. It is the version the scholarly record points to, the one that carries any later corrections or retractions, and the one that should normally be cited. The concept of a version of record exists precisely so that, among several coexisting forms, there is one designated authoritative object that the record and its corrections attach to.

    How they fit together

    The clean way to hold this in mind is as a sequence of states of one work:

    1. Preprint — complete, public, citable, not peer-reviewed.
    2. (Peer review happens.)
    3. Accepted manuscript / postprint — peer-reviewed content, not yet publisher-formatted; the usual green-OA archive copy.
    4. Version of record — the final, formatted, authoritative, citable version.

    Crucially, these can all exist simultaneously and should link to one another. A well-managed preprint server displays a link from the preprint to the published version of record once it appears; the version of record, in turn, may acknowledge the preprint. Persistent identifiers are what make this linkage reliable: the preprint and the VoR each have their own DOI, and the relationship between them is recorded in metadata so that a reader arriving at one can find the other.

    Which version to cite

    • Cite the version of record where it exists. It is the authoritative, corrected, formally published instance, and citing it ensures your reference points to what was validated and to any subsequent corrections.
    • Cite the preprint as a preprint when that is genuinely what you used — for example a result not yet published elsewhere — and label it clearly as a preprint, with its DOI, so a reader knows it has not been peer-reviewed.
    • Do not cite a preprint as though it were the published article. If a version of record now exists, prefer it; the preprint and the final version can differ in their conclusions after revision.
    • Check for a newer version. Preprints are often updated; the VoR may carry corrections. Cite the specific version you relied on, and prefer the most authoritative current one.

    A note on what preprints do and do not change

    Preprints have made research faster and more open, and they are now a first-class part of the scholarly record rather than a fringe practice. But they do not replace peer review or the version of record; they sit before them. The healthiest reading of the current landscape is not preprint versus journal but a pipeline in which the same work moves from open-but-unreviewed to reviewed-and-authoritative, with each stage clearly labelled and linked. Confusion arises only when the labels are dropped — when a preprint is presented, or cited, as if it had the standing of the version of record.

    Where shared vocabulary fits

    “Preprint”, “postprint”, “accepted manuscript”, and “version of record” are used inconsistently — and sometimes interchangeably — across servers, repositories, and citation styles, which is exactly how the wrong version ends up cited. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these versions precisely and records the relationships between them is what lets a citation point unambiguously to the right object. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play; the relevant terms sit in the research-outputs domain.

    Related reading

  • Living and versioned research outputs: dynamic publications and continuous updates

    For most of the history of scholarly publishing, a research output has been a fixed thing. A paper is written, reviewed, published and then, save for the occasional correction, frozen: the version that appears is the version that endures, cited and read in exactly the form it was issued. There is a real virtue in this fixity — a stable, citable record everyone can refer to with confidence. But there is also a tension, because knowledge does not stand still. New evidence arrives, errors are found, methods improve, and a static document published years ago may no longer reflect what is known. A growing class of living and versioned research outputs tries to resolve this tension by allowing outputs to be updated over time while remaining citable and trustworthy. This article explores those outputs and the challenges they raise, drawing on the research outputs domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.

    Living systematic reviews

    The clearest example of a deliberately dynamic output is the living systematic review. A systematic review gathers and synthesises all the available evidence on a question, and it is enormously valuable — but it has a built-in problem: the moment it is published, it begins to go out of date, because new studies keep appearing. In a fast-moving field, a review can be obsolete within a year or two, yet it may continue to be cited as authoritative. A living systematic review addresses this by being continuously or regularly updated as new evidence emerges, rather than being conducted once and left to age. The review becomes an ongoing process — a maintained synthesis that keeps pace with the literature — rather than a one-off snapshot. This is invaluable in areas where keeping current matters most, but it changes the nature of the output: it is no longer a fixed document but a living one, and that has consequences for how it is cited and trusted.

    Versioned preprints

    A different but related development is the versioned preprint. Preprints — research papers shared publicly before, or alongside, formal peer review — are inherently dynamic: an author posts an early version, receives feedback, revises, and posts a new version, often several times. Preprint servers handle this through explicit versioning, so that version 1, version 2 and so on each exist as distinct, citable entities, and a reader can see both the latest version and the history of how the work evolved. This is honest and useful: it shows the work developing, and it lets a reader cite the specific version they actually read. But it also means that “the preprint” is not a single thing — it is a series of versions, and which one a citation refers to genuinely matters.

    The version-of-record problem

    All of this raises a fundamental question that the traditional model never had to face squarely: in a world of multiple versions, what is the version of record? The version of record is, classically, the definitive, citable version of a work — the one the scholarly record points to as authoritative. When outputs were fixed, this was simple. When an output exists in many versions, or is continuously updated, several questions become pressing:

    • Which version is authoritative — the latest, or the one a given reader relied upon?
    • How do citations stay precise when the thing being cited keeps changing?
    • How is the history preserved so that a claim made on the basis of an earlier version can still be checked against that version?
    • How does a reader know they are looking at the current state of a living output, rather than a superseded one?

    These are not merely technical questions; they go to the heart of what makes the scholarly record reliable. A record that changes without trace would be untrustworthy; a record that cannot be updated would be inaccurate. The challenge is to allow updating while preserving citability and history.

    How DOIs handle versions

    The infrastructure that makes versioned outputs workable is the persistent identifier, and in particular the way DOIs can be assigned to versions. A common and powerful pattern is to mint a DOI for each specific version of an output and a separate “concept” or top-level DOI that always points to the latest version of the work as a whole. This gives the best of both worlds: someone who wants to cite exactly what they read can cite the version-specific DOI, confident it will always resolve to that exact version; while someone who wants to point readers to the current state can use the concept DOI, which follows the work as it evolves. Versioning at the identifier level is what lets a living output be both stable (each version is fixed and permanently citable) and dynamic (the work as a whole keeps moving forward). It reconciles the apparent contradiction between fixity and change.

    Continuously updated outputs more broadly

    Living reviews and versioned preprints are the prominent cases, but the underlying pattern — outputs that are maintained and updated rather than issued once and frozen — appears elsewhere too: datasets that grow and are re-released, software that moves through versions, guidelines and protocols that are revised as practice changes. In each case the same principles apply: clear versioning, persistent identifiers for both specific versions and the evolving whole, and transparent records of what changed and when. The broad taxonomy of modern research outputs increasingly has to accommodate things that change over time, not just things that are finished and fixed.

    A shared vocabulary for versions and outputs

    For versioned and living outputs to work across repositories, publishers and citing systems, the concepts involved must be described consistently — what a version is, how it relates to the work as a whole, which is the version of record, and how the relationships between versions are expressed. Inconsistency here breaks exactly the citability that versioning is meant to preserve. That consistency is what the CASRAI Dictionary supports: a shared vocabulary so that version and output information is understood identically wherever it appears. And because maintaining a living output over time is genuine, ongoing contribution, the work can be described in the same framework used for every other — the CRediT taxonomy and its full set of contribution roles. The scholarly record is learning to do something it never used to: stand still enough to be trusted while moving enough to stay true.