Open access publisher BioMed Central, UK, has announced that it now supports access from mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets.
BioMed Central portals and journal websites have been updated so that users on smartphones or tablets have an enhanced experience when viewing full text articles, making better use of small screen sizes and touch-screen functionality. Improving the experience when reading full-text articles is the company's first priority. It will be rolling out further mobile optimisations in the coming months. BioMed Central's blog network is already optimised for mobile.
BioMed Central uses a 'responsive' web design. This means that the website automatically responds to the capabilities of the device that is being used. On a typical desktop computer, the user sees the standard version. On a device with a small screen, the user automatically sees the mobile-optimised appearance, but has the option to switch to the standard desktop view.
To improve the mobile reading experience, figures are displayed inline rather than as pop-ups. On all mobile operating systems, clicking a figure will load the high resolution version. On iOS, used on Apple's mobile/tablet, the high resolution version of a figure can also be viewed simply by using the 'pinch and stretch' motion to zoom in. The high resolution version will then be automatically loaded when needed.
A convenient way to save articles for offline viewing is to save the PDF to a reader such as iBooks (iOS), a file sharing app such as DropBox (iOS, Android), or to a bibliographic management app such as Papers (iOS) or Mendeley (iOS, Android).
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