STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands,
has announced the 'Article of the Future' project, an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to
redefine how a scientific article is presented online. The project takes full advantage of online capabilities,
allowing readers individualised entry points and routes through content, while exploiting the latest advances
in visualisation techniques.
The Article of the Future is set to launch its first prototypes this week,
revealing a new approach to presenting scientific research online. The key feature of the prototypes is a hierarchical
presentation of text and figures so that readers can elect to drill down through the layers based on their current
task in the scientific workflow and their level of expertise and interest. This organisational structure is a
significant departure from the linear-based organisation of a traditional print-based article in incorporating
the core text and supplemental material within a single unified structure.
A second key feature of the
prototypes is bulleted article highlights and a graphical abstract. This allows readers to quickly
gain an understanding of the paper's main 'take home' message and serves as a navigation mechanism to
directly access specific sub-sections of the results and figures. The graphical abstract is intended to
encourage browsing, promote interdisciplinary scholarship and help readers identify more quickly which papers
are most relevant to their research interests.
The prototypes have been developed by the editorial,
production and IT teams at Cell Press in collaboration with Elsevier's User Centered Design group using content
from two previously published Cell articles. They can be viewed at
http://beta.cell.com where Elsevier and Cell Press are inviting feedback from the scientific community on the
concepts and implementations. Successful ideas from this project will ultimately be rolled-out across Elsevier's
portfolio of 2,000 journals available on ScienceDirect.
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