By Kevin Davies
July 20, 2009 | In a further sign that academic publishing is looking to embrace the opportunities provided by multimedia, the giant Dutch publisher Elsevier and its flagship subsidiary Cell Press have introduced a demo of the “Article of the Future” – a new prototype for publishing scientific articles that features enhanced graphical navigation, integrated multimedia, and a non-linear structure.
The “Article of the Future” is billed as “an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how a scientific article is presented online.” This week, the first two article prototypes were launched at beta.cell.com, where viewers are invited to comment on the overall design and functionality.
“The genesis of the ‘Article of the Future’ project came from a challenge to redesign from scratch how to most effectively structure and present the content of a traditional scientific article in an online environment,” said Emilie Marcus, editor-in-chief of Cell, the leading molecular biology journal and cornerstone of Cell Press.
“The rapid pace of technological advancements means this will undoubtedly be an evolving design, but we are happy to be able to address some key reader and author pain points such as the integration of supplemental data with these initial prototypes,” said Marcus.
Among the distinguishing features of the prototype articles is a hierarchical presentation of text, figures and tables. This enables readers to address the information in multiple ways depending on their own interests and expertise, rather than approach the manuscript in a traditional linear fashion. Each article also contains bulleted highlights and a graphical abstract, to assist readers quickly grasp the central message of the paper. The graphical abstract encourages browsing, one of the advantages of printed journals.
Other features in the beta demonstrations include embedded podcasts, featuring an interview between a Cell Press editor and the article’s lead author. That wouldn’t be feasible for every published paper, but the same idea could be used to allow authors to present their own supplementary multimedia presentations (as seen for example on SciVee.tv.)
In addition, the beta models include a figure that contains clickable areas to serve as a navigational device to other sections of the article. The methods section contains basic and extended views in the event that readers wish to find the necessary depth of detail to replicate the experiment. All main and supplementary figures can be viewed together and selected. Real-time reference analyses provide the ability to explore references along with their updated citation statistics.
The prototypes were developed by the Cell Press in conjunction with Elsevier’s User Centered Design group. While accessible summaries (a feature introduced by Nature Medicine more than a decade ago and continued by the Public Library of Science), podcasts and other features are not necessarily unique, it is noteworthy to see one of the largest academic publishers moving aggressively to implement such tools. Elsevier eventually plans to roll out the results of this experiment across its entire portfolio of 2,000 journals on ScienceDirect.
“Together with the 2009 Elsevier Grand Challenge, the ‘Article of the Future’ project forms part of Elsevier’s commitment to collaborating with our scientific community on content innovation,” said IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, VP content innovation for Elsevier Science & Technology Journal Publishing, “These tools… are central to driving innovation in scientific publishing and represent our investment in the future of research, enabling scientists all over the world to access, interpret, and create better science more efficiently.”