Beyond PDF: why your academic journal should publish in HTML and EPUB

Most academic journals publish their articles only as PDFs. That is understandable: it is the traditional format, authors expect it and it is suitable for printing. But an article that only exists as a PDF is harder to read on a mobile phone, less accessible and, in some cases, less visible to academic search engines. There are good reasons to publish in HTML and EPUB as well.

In this article we explain what HTML and EPUB bring to the table, and how to publish them without multiplying the editorial team’s workload.

1. Visibility: how academic search engines read your journal

Google Scholar indexes articles in both HTML and PDF, but its guidelines for publishers are very specific:

• Each article must have its own URL, and the full text or the complete abstract must be visible without logging in or clicking.
• Article pages must include bibliographic metadata (such as citation_title, citation_author and citation_publication_date) and, if there is a PDF, link to it with citation_pdf_url.
• PDFs must contain selectable text and must not exceed 5 MB.

An HTML article page, with its abstract visible and its metadata in place, is the most reliable way to meet these guidelines. HTML is also read by general search engines and discovery tools, which struggle to interpret a PDF.

2. Reading: most people already read on their phones

A two-column PDF on a phone screen forces readers to zoom in and scroll in every direction. HTML and EPUB adapt to the screen: the text reflows, tables can be scrolled and figures can be enlarged. For a reader arriving from social media or an email, those first few seconds make the difference between staying and leaving.

3. Accessibility: a growing requirement

People who use screen readers have great difficulty with PDFs that have not been prepared for them. Well-structured HTML and EPUB are designed to make content accessible: real headings, alternative text for images, properly structured tables.

In the European Union, the European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) has applied since June 2025 to certain digital products and services, including e-books. Its exact scope for academic journals is still open to debate and will depend on each case, but the trend is clear: publishing in accessible formats will increasingly be expected by readers, funders and institutions.

4. Reuse: structured content goes further

If the HTML and EPUB are generated from a structured version of the article, such as JATS XML, the same content can feed databases, repositories and new channels without being redone.

The problem: more formats, more work

The reason many journals do not publish in HTML or EPUB is not that they fail to see the benefits, but time. Producing each format separately can add several hours per article, and every correction has to be repeated in all of them. As a result, the HTML often ends up as a poor-quality automatic conversion and the EPUB simply never gets made.

The solution: every format from a single source

With Index Production, the team uploads the author’s Word file and gets the PDF, HTML, JATS XML and EPUB all at once, in the journal’s own design and in sync with one another. Publishing in four formats no longer costs four times as much: the work is simply reviewing and approving.

Want to know how much time you would save by publishing every format this way? Try our savings calculator: enter how many articles you publish and which formats you currently offer, and you will see which formats you would gain and how many hours you would free up.