What is an Online First Publication?
Online First Publication, also called OFP or First Posting, is a publication status that you may see for journal articles in the APA PsycArticles® database. It means that an article has been published online ahead of its journal issue. You can think of it like an artist’s single that premiers ahead of the full album.
How does this early publishing work?
Most scholarly journals release new issues once every month or once every quarter. When an article has been accepted for publication, and the author and publisher have completed any needed edits or corrections to the manuscript, it is assigned to an issue. But it may be months before that issue is published. In order to make the research available sooner, a “First Posting” version of the article is added to APA PsycArticles. It will reach “full publication” status between 1 month and 1 year later, when the issue is published.
What if something changes between the OFP’s release and the full publication?
Any record, OFP or not, can be corrected and have a replacement version released in APA PsycArticles. These corrected records are added twice weekly, at the same time as new records.