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Elsevier Introduces Article of the Future Project

Elsevier (www.elsevier.com) 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 individualized entry points and routes through content while exploiting the latest advances in visualization techniques.

The Article of the Future launched its first prototypes. 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 organizational structure is a significant departure from the linear-based organization 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 papers main take-home message and serves as a navigation mechanism to directly access specific subsections 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 (an imprint of Elsevier) 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.

Source: Elsevier