Lens, an open-source tool introduced by eLife to make reading articles online easier, is being piloted in journals from six publishers on the HighWire platform.
The Journal of Biological Chemistry, The Plant Cell, Journal of Lipid Research, and mBio® are among the journals introducing the Lens viewing experience to readers this fall. First introduced by eLife in 2013, Lens makes reading scientific articles on-screen easier by making it possible to explore figures, figure descriptions, references, and more – without losing your place in the article text.
Publishers taking part in the pilot currently include: American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), American Society for Microbiology (ASM), American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), and European Respiratory Society (ERS), all of which use the HighWire Open Platform to host their content. In the next several weeks, the American Physiological Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) will join the pilot.
The pilot is expected to run for three months. If successful, the Lens viewer will be made available as an option to all publishers on the HighWire platform in 2015. eLife continues to explore potential uses and to develop the Lens code base at https://github.com/elifesciences/lens/.
eLife Lens is available at http://lens.elifesciences.org. Lens may also be previewed with full-text articles at ten HighWire-hosted journals now. These include Journal of Lipid Research, Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, and Journal of Biological Chemistry from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; mBio®, Clinical Microbiology Reviews, and Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy from the American Society for Microbiology; The Plant Cell and Plant Physiology from the American Society of Plant Biologists; and European Respiratory Review and the European Respiratory Journal from the European Respiratory Society.
