What Is Electronic Publishing?

Electronic publishing is the production, distribution, and access of written or multimedia content in digital formats, delivered through networks or physical digital media rather than through conventional print. It encompasses scholarly journals, ebooks, digital magazines, online newspapers, and institutional repositories, along with the workflows, file formats, and infrastructure that support them. The field draws on computer science, information science, and library science, addressing how documents are structured, indexed, preserved, and made accessible to readers and automated systems alike.

The origins of electronic publishing trace to the early 1970s with Project Gutenberg, which began digitizing public-domain texts, and to the CD-ROM era of the 1980s and 1990s, when encyclopedias and scientific reference works were distributed on optical disc. Internet connectivity in the 1990s shifted distribution from physical media to online access, enabling continuous updating and global reach. By the early 2000s, the majority of scientific journals in the physical sciences and engineering were available electronically, reshaping how researchers discover and cite literature.

Digital Distribution Formats

Electronic publishing relies on a set of document formats designed for on-screen reading, machine processing, or both. The Portable Document Format (PDF) preserves print layout and is the dominant format for scholarly articles and formal reports. EPUB, maintained by the W3C and the IDPF, is a reflowable format designed for ebooks and reading devices, allowing text to reflow to fit different screen sizes. HTML remains the native format of the open web. Metadata standards such as Dublin Core and JATS (Journal Article Tag Suite) enable document discovery, citation indexing, and interoperability between publisher systems and library catalogs. The Journal of Electronic Publishing covers research on formats, workflows, and the economics of digital distribution.

Open Access and Open Data

Open access publishing refers to making scholarly literature freely available online without subscription barriers, supported by author processing charges, institutional funding, or publisher business model changes. The Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2002 gave the movement its formal statement of principle, distinguishing between "gratis" open access (free to read) and "libre" open access (free to read and reuse under defined licenses). Open data, a related concept, applies the same principle to research datasets, requiring that underlying data be deposited in accessible repositories alongside the published article. Requirements for open data deposition have been adopted by major funders including the National Institutes of Health and the European Research Council, reflected in policies such as those described in NIH's data management and sharing guidance. Together, open access and open data have altered the business structures of academic publishing and increased the discoverability of research outputs.

Multimedia Systems in Publishing

Beyond text-based documents, electronic publishing supports multimedia content: embedded video, interactive data visualizations, supplementary datasets, and linked semantic annotations. Publishers in science and engineering increasingly require authors to deposit supplementary materials in indexed repositories alongside the primary article. Some journals support enhanced HTML publications that display figures interactively or embed computational notebooks. Managing multimedia objects introduces challenges in long-term digital preservation, format obsolescence, and file size, which libraries and publishers address through archiving agreements with organizations like CLOCKSS and Portico. The ScienceDirect overview of electronic publishing covers the technical dimensions of multimedia integration in scholarly workflows.

Applications

Electronic publishing has applications across a wide range of information-sharing contexts, including:

• Scientific and technical journals, enabling rapid global dissemination of research findings
• Ebook distribution platforms for consumer and educational markets
• Digital archives and institutional repositories for preserving grey literature and thesis collections
• Online news and magazine publishing with real-time updating and reader analytics
• Government and legal document publishing, providing open access to regulations, statutes, and court records