The recommended practice guidelines presented in NISO RP-16-2013 offer guidance to e-journal publishers and providers that will help ensure that e-journal content can be reliably discovered, cited, and accessed by users over time.

Electronic journals (e-journals) are a critical component of the global scholarly infrastructure. As is the case with print journals, the contents of e-journals and their related metadata become part of the historical scholarly record. Citations to articles in print journals, and now in e-journals, form the basis for much scholarly research.

The publishers and providers of e-journals take great pride in the diverse designs of their websites. Yet how these websites present, identify, and link together the publications that they display can make the end user's task of discovering articles and accessing them easy, frustrating, or completely fruitless. The issues that are involved have been well summarized in "In Search of Best Practices for the Presentation of E-Journals" (Regina Romano Reynolds and Cindy Hepfer, Information Standards Quarterly, v. 21, issue 2 (Spring 2009), pp. 18-24).