Article of the Future

Elsevier kondigt het Article of the Future project aan, waarin samen met de wetenschappelijke gemeenschap gepoogd wordt de presentatie van het wetenschappelijke artikel in het digitale, online tijdperk te herdefiniëren.
Een tweetal prototypes (I en II) worden gepresenteerd, waarbij een aantal zaken opvallen:

1. A hierarchical presentation of text and figures so that readers can elect to drill down through the layers of content based on 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.
2. A graphical abstract allows readers to quickly gain an understanding of the main take-home message of the paper. 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.
3. Research highlights provide a bulleted list of the key results of the article.
Author-Affiliation highlighting makes it easy to see an author’s affiliations and all authors from the same affiliation.
4. A figure that contains clickable areas so that it can be used as a navigation mechanism to directly access specific sub-sections of the results and figures.
5. Integrated audio and video let authors present the context of their article via an interview or video presentation and allow animations to be displayed more effectively.
6. The Experimental Procedures section contains alternate views allowing readers to see a summary or the full details necessary to replicate the experiment.
7. A new approach to displaying figures allows the reader to identify quickly which figures they are interested in and then drill down through related supplemental figures. All supplemental figures are displayed individually and directly linked to the main figure to which they are related.
8. Real-time reference analyses provide a rich environment to explore the content of the article via the list of citations.

Eigenlijk niet zo veel nieuws onder de zon. De hier reeds eerder genoemde en geroemde JoVE en SciVee zetten een vergelijkbaar concept al enige tijd neer. Wel van belang is het feit dat zo'n grote speler als Elsevier zich openstelt voor de verworvenheden van deze tijd. Met een scheef oog kijken naar bijvoorbeeld Nature of PloS ONE kan ook geen kwaad!