STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced that research tool ‘Reflect’, winner of Elsevier’s Grand Challenge 2009, will be piloted on the research articles in the November 12th issue of journal Cell. The Cell-Reflect pilot is the next step in Elsevier’s ongoing Content Innovation effort with the scientific community to determine how a scientific article is best presented online. This follows Elsevier’s recent launch of an initial ‘Article of the Future’ prototype with Cell, where the traditional linear journal article is displayed in a much more useful format for life scientists.
Developed and maintained at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany, and at the NNF Center for Protein Research, Copenhagen, Denmark, Reflect is a free service that can tag scientific terms in any web-page without affecting document layout. The tool is fast and easy-to-use. End-users can install Reflect as a plug-in for Firefox or Internet Explorer; publishers and content providers can access Reflect programmatically to create tagged versions of their content. The tool identifies the proteins, genes and small molecules mentioned in the Cell articles, and generates pop-up windows containing relevant contextual information, with additional links, about those entities.
Inside an article, ‘Reflect’ tags and colours gene, protein, or small molecule names on any web page, usually within seconds, without affecting the article itself or its web page layout. Clicking on a tagged or coloured item opens a popup, showing a concise summary of contextually important features, such as sequence (for proteins) or 2D structure (for small molecules).
The Cell-Reflect pilot can be viewed at http://beta.cell.com/index.php/2009/11/reflect/. Elsevier and Cell Press are inviting feedback from the scientific community on the concept and implementation. User feedback will be collected through user interviews and a survey on the Cell web site. The nature of this feedback will ultimately determine whether and when ‘Reflect’ will be rolled-out across Elsevier’s portfolio of life sciences journals on cell.com and ScienceDirect.
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