The general periodical submission process is: submission-peer review-publication (paper publication)-network retrieval, that is, first publish the paper publication, and then upload the electronic version of the materials to the cooperative database; The process of network delivery is: submission-review-network search-publication (paper publication), while network delivery is to upload data to the network delivery platform first, and then publish paper publications.
It is not difficult to see that the definition of "network delivery" actually means online preview. Some magazines submit the electronic data of current papers to search platforms such as HowNet and Wanfang before the paper version is published. In other words, the online publishing time is earlier than the paper version.
The reason for the emergence of online publication is that the whole process from submission to publication is relatively long, at least three months at a time, which really delays a lot of time for authors who are eager to submit materials for review. After the online publishing journals are confirmed to be hired, articles can enter the online publishing process, that is, the articles that are confirmed to be hired are uploaded to the publishing platform, which generally takes less than 1 week. This means that when the authors' articles are hired, they can usually be retrieved from HowNet within the same month, which greatly shortens the waiting time for those authors to wait 3-9 months or even longer to get paper publications after receiving the employment notice.
In view of this, some units will explain in the paper review document that if the author's paper is really too late to be published on the paper before the review, it can also be published online, as long as the search certificate is provided after it is published online. After all, the publication of a paper that can be launched online is also certain, which means that the article is really successful and officially published, which is the same as the effectiveness of paper publications.