Publication in the Online First Directory

Recent technological progress has enabled us to meet authors' requirements for shorter publication times. Thus we are pleased to announce that Springer-Verlag is introducing the Online First (OF) publication concept for Acta Informatica. This new facility has been installed by Springer's Internet service (http://www.springerlink.com). From now on papers will be published in electronic form as OF papers shortly after proofs have been corrected by the author and returned to Springer. This means a significant reduction in the publication time. At this stage, OF papers will have no citation line (volume, pages, year) or page numbers but will be marked by an international identification code which can used for citation purposes (see below). A line indicating the exact OF-publication date will be printed beneath the title.For publication in the subsequent print version, the citation line and page numbers will be added, but the content of the article will remain unchanged. Authors will be informed at the proofreading stage that after electronic publication they cannot change the content of a paper, nor can they withdraw it from publication.Each article will be announced by Springer's Alert service. Access to the full papers is restricted to subscribers of the printed version.An OF paper is a genuine publication and not a new form of preprint. It is copyright-protected and it can be cited exactly like any printed paper. An OF paper is citeable by a "Digital Object Identifier" (or DOI), a unique and persistent international identification code, included in both the print and electronic versions. The DOI can also be used to create hyperlinks to OF papers: although files may be moved to other locations on the Springer server after print publication, the DOI is never changed.September 2003