Delay between online and offline issue of journals: A critical analysis

Journals, which were earlier published in print-only version, are now published in both the online and print versions. It has been established that online versions, free or not, have greater impact over the print version. But there is a difference between the dates of publication of the online and print version of the same journal. This is called the delay measured in terms of days. The purpose of this study is to find the average time delay. For this, data for more than 200 journals of various subjects from different publishers have been manually acquired for publications during the first 6 months of year 2005. Further subject-wise investigation was made during the last month of the year 2005. The average delay is found to be nearly 3 months, but it varies for different publishers. Also, the issue of large deviation from the average delay – as noted in some journals – will be discussed here.