Academic publisher SAGE has announced that the planned upgrade of the SAGE Journals Online platform will be complete by July 30, 2010. More than 560 journals will be migrated onto SAGE's next generation platform, supported by HighWire's H2O platform and accompanying services and infrastructure.
To ensure that the transition causes minimal disruption to access, the final stages of the upgrade have been scheduled to coincide with academic summer recess, with the bulk of publications planned to migrate from mid-June to mid-July. SAGE and HighWire do not anticipate downtime of the entire platform at any time during the migration. Access control for institutions and individuals will not be affected by the migration. Administrative features and access to usage reports will also remain the same. URLs of journal sites will not change therefore no changes will need to be made to OPACs.
A major goal of the platform upgrade is to keep readers in context and to streamline research. The new three-column user interface is designed to highlight features available without taking attention away from the substantive article content. Features most closely associated with the manuscript pages are placed closest to it. As web research increasingly brings users right to the article page, this page needs to carry elements of the homepage and table of contents, providing intelligent choices to the reader as soon as they arrive.
Several individual sites have already been migrated in 2009 and early 2010. The new platform utilises all current web standards, which poises SAGE to integrate new technologies and services, including web 2.0 features and output through mobile channels.
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