STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced that all research articles in its collection of Cell Press journals will be published online in the new ‘Article of the Future’ format. Previously released as a demonstration prototype for two sample articles, the Article of the Future is an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community that seeks to redefine how scientific articles are presented online. Successful ideas from this project are planned to be rolled out across Elsevier’s portfolio of 2,000 journals available on ScienceDirect, a scientific, technical and medical database.
To mark the launch and to encourage user feedback, Article of the Future articles are accessible for free for Cell Press’ flagship title, Cell, on www.cell.com, for the first four issues of 2010.
The Article of the Future is seen to reflect a new approach to structuring the traditional sections of a research article. The effort is to move away from the linear format required by print presentation to an integrated, linked navigation scheme that allows each reader to create a personalised path through the article’s content. A key feature of the functionality is a tabbed navigation structure through the Introduction, Results, Figures and Discussion sections. This is projected to provide experts with in-depth coverage of a particular experiment, while allowing more general readers to absorb the main message without being overwhelmed by additional details.
There is a graphical abstract and a highlights section on the landing page of each article, complimenting the abstract text by creating a quickly reviewable visual summary and bullet points. In addition, articles will offer the article’s text, a figure and a figure caption at the same time on one screen, with a zooming capability to discover the finer details of a figure. Selected articles offer integrated multimedia by featuring PaperFlicks, a video tour of an article’s content.
The latest relase of Article of the Future features at Cell Press is part of Elsevier’s larger Content Innovation initiative. This initiative aims at improving the formal scientific communication in a scalable way, and includes efforts to enhance the presentation of the current scientific article.
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