Online Journal

Online Journal

An online journal can be any kind of publication that is distributed in a serial time frame and is recorded on the Internet in order for people to view. There are many different examples of online journals, and most of them are quite similar in nature to journals in the offline or real world. You can get literary journals, news journals and any number of specialist niche journals dedicated to a specific subject matter. There are also many publications that are distributed in order to be read by a specific professional or academic market. An online journal can be loosely focused and cover a wide niche or it can be extremely tightly focused covering a certain aspect of a specific sub culture. Most journals, of course, fall somewhere in between these two extremes.

An online journal is similar in some ways to a blog, but if looked at carefully these two are really quite different beasts. A blog has a very open policy regarding submissions and syndication, while a journal will generally have a much stricter and more controlled editorial policy. This allows online journals to act with a degree of authority as they can ensure the quality of their content and guarantee that the needs of their readers and sponsors are met. Online diaries are another close cousin of online journals, and while similar to real world personal journals, an online diary is closer to a blog than it is to what is now known as an online journal. Again the difference rests on a more aggressive editorial policy and more emphasis on general quality control.

An online journal that is exclusively for scholarly issues is normally classed as an electronic journal, but cross pollination does occur and sometimes the lines of definition are blurred. An online journal will normally provide the reader will the full text of an article. Most of them will provide a printing feature so that a reader can copy out a hard copy for themselves to read at their leisure. Some online journals are exclusive to the Internet and no hard copy exists unless a reader prints one out, and there is certainly no distribution of any hard copy material. Others are like an offshoot of a real world hard copy journal that already exists, and may be exactly the same as an offline publication or with sometimes even with less features.

A great number of the publications that are frequently read by the public could be classed as journals. For example, publicity based journals relating to eyelid surgery (Augenlid OP) and the cosmetic industry are regular features on a number of websites around the world, and have no direct equivalent outside the digital domain. With most of these publications now enjoying an online presence, they could be classed as online journals, it really is quite a broad definition. Online newspapers, online magazines also known as ezines, culture specific newsletters, these could all be classified as online journals as long as they are distributed in a controlled and periodic fashion and presented in a digital format on the Internet.