The online scientific article is evolving. IOP Publishing (IOP) has today announced the start of its article evolution programme, a new project designed to improve the online delivery of research articles, enabling readers to interact with research in new ways.
The first online release from the project has gone live today providing an enhanced HTML view for all new published articles in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical and Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter.
This enhanced view improves the appearance of an article and increases the potential ways the reader can interact with research online, such as the ability to zoom in and out of images, making it easier to look at complex details and structures and export them into presentations. Video abstracts are now embedded within the enhanced HTML article and the option to view mathematics using MathJax technology has also been made available for the first time on IOPscience.
Olaf Ernst, commercial director of IOP said: “The article evolution project is a long-term commitment to innovation and this first release is a significant step towards our goal of delivering the best publishing and reading experience. We have employed the best of the newer web technologies to make it possible for our users to better engage with and use our content and to offer authors new ways to present their research online.
“We will work closely with all our users to build on this first phase to continue refining and advancing the article view to meet the needs of the research community.”
In order to make these changes possible IOP has harnessed the power of XML by investing in MarkLogic technology, meaning that future developments can be rolled out quickly, making it easier for IOP to respond to customer feedback on the article evolution project.
All other IOP-owned and selected partner journals will adopt the new enhanced article view and features for their 2012 volumes.
Initial feedback from researchers collaborating on the project has been extremely positive and IOP is now actively seeking feedback from the wider community. Over the next few weeks, starting today, screen shots of the new developments will be posted on the IOPscience twitter account for feedback. The IOPscience product manager and developers will be available to answer questions, respond to feedback and take suggestions for the next phases of development. Please visit twitter for more information.
For more information on the article evolution project and how this looks on IOPscience, please go to the information page.