Publishing platform improvements

Hi, my name is James Stevens and I’m the product development manager for journals and books. You can find out more about my team and how you can help improve our website at the bottom of this article but, first and foremost, I wanted to let you know that we have just released a new feature so I’ll pass you over to Colin Batchelor from our Data Science team to give you some background:

Citation velocity

screenshot of royal society of chemistry publishing platform feature citation velocity
Over the past couple of months we surveyed many of you, our readers, and it was clear that you wanted to read papers that were highly cited, especially hot papers which have been cited recently.
Our Data Science team experimented with different ways of ranking papers according to the number of citations* in order to find a method that gives the most interesting results for you.

First of all we tried:

  • Ranking the total number of citations for all papers for all time
  • Ranking the growth in citations for all papers over the past two years

These both gave useful information, but the list of top-ranked papers according to these two methods didn’t change from week to week and consisted of our “greatest hits”. Those papers would be familiar to readers of the journal already. For example, this paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/TF9444000546 from Trans. Faraday Soc. in 1944 on wettability and duck feathers gets dozens of citations a year.

In order to find new and highly cited papers, we started to look at the most recent citations to articles published over the past two years. We compared the lists given by taking citations from the past 30 days, 90 days, six months and a year, and found that the 90 day period produced the most meaningful data for readers, even for the smallest journals, and a list that changes from week to week.

Why two years? It takes time for papers to be read and cited in a published article, so any period shorter than two years didn’t provide enough data.

How do we capture the “most recently cited” (to ensure that the most recent citations had the biggest effect on the list)?  We did this by giving each citation a score, 1 for a paper cited today, 0.5 for a paper cited 45 days ago, and 0 for a paper cited 90 days ago. We worked out the total score for every paper by adding up its citation scores and then ranked the papers according to their scores.

This is called the citation velocity and you can now view it on any of our journal landing pages.

See it in action now on the Chemical Science journal.

*Citation data from CrossRef

Get involved in the evolution of our platform:

Thanks Colin, we look forward to getting your feedback on our new feature.

As you can see our publishing platform is changing and as such we would really like your help to ensure the changes we make are effective for your needs.

We have had feedback from users in certain countries around the world that the platform does not load as fast as some of our competitors. In other analysis work we’ve uncovered that there are certain features that some of you don’t use and, because of the large number of them on a page, the platform is hard to navigate, especially when using a phone or tablet. We will urgently focus on the improvements in these areas and in order to ensure we change the right things we need to understand the modern ways you carry out your scientific research, and in particular how we can make that easier and faster for you.

If you would like to support us in this process there are three areas where we think you could considerably help to speed up the time it takes to make improvements for you.

  1. Platform testing – in order to check that the development work we carry out improves the platform for its users we run test sessions (in person and via web conference) that we are currently recruiting for. We pay up to £50 to successful registrants and if you’re interested you can sign up via the following page: Register your interest
  2. example of vote buttonIdea submission – we have set up a portal for publishing platform users to submit their ideas for platform development. We’re looking for new features or changes to our existing offering that will reduce the time or complexity of your research work. Please scan through the ideas we’ve already collected and vote (by clicking the vote box) on the ones that you’d like to see make it to development or add your own unique ones.
  3. Bug reporting – please use the feedback link on the platform navigation bar to report anything that is not working or is hard to use:




Further product management team information:

My team is responsible for ensuring the publishing website serves journal articles and book chapters up to researchers effectively. We strive to ensure the articles and chapters we publish are rapidly delivered around the world in formats that are easy to read and accessible to all who want to use them no matter what their physical capabilities.

It is our job to have regular catch ups and conversations with our authors and recognise that we have a duty as publishers to ensure that their work is easily found and accessed by others. We must showcase the high quality scientific research they submit to us in the best light on our website through the use of easy to read designs, quick to navigate layouts and an easy to use website structure.

In addition we need to make sure the website is always available for our worldwide audience, secure from intrusions, high performing and its content is regularly distributed to text miners, search engines and abstracting and indexing services.

Our aim is to ensure the features that we develop on our website have the most impact for you, our valued user. So, please get in touch, we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

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Want more information on Royal Society of Chemistry’s acquisition of MarinLit

What is MarinLit?

MarinLit is a database dedicated to Marine Natural Products (MNP) research. This database was established in the 1970’s by two MNP Professors John Blunt and Murray Munro at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. It was designed as an in-house system to fulfil the needs of the University of Canterbury Marine Group and has been developed to contain searchable features that are unique. The extremely comprehensive range of data contained along with these powerful features makes MarinLit the database of choice for MNP chemists.
How does the acquisition of MarinLit fit into the Royal Society of Chemistry’s broader strategy?

MarinLit is an excellent strategic fit for the Royal Society of Chemistry. It is used by marine natural products scientists around the world and provides an excellent strategic fit with the rest of our publishing portfolio and expands our natural product portfolio which includes Natural Product Reports and Natural Product Updates, and will complement existing products such as ChemSpider.

What changes can MarinLit users expect to see?

The Royal Society of Chemistry will continue to support and enhance MarinLit, our first development will be to produce a web based version, which will be ready in early 2014. Your experience will remain the same, you can expect the same great dedication as you always have from the MarinLit team. For all intents and purposes, it’ll be business as usual.

What are the future plans for MarinLit?

The Royal Society of Chemistry will work closely with John and Murray to develop MarinLit to ensure the same level of cutting edge functionality is offered to subscribers. In fact, one of the reasons John and Murray were keen to collaborate with us was they felt confident we could support planned functionality developments – such as creating a web based version which will be launched early 2014.

What will web MarinLit mean for the existing Foxpro database version?

The Royal Society of Chemistry will continue to provide data updates for a short period while customers switch to the web version. This timeframe is still under discussion; please contact us directly if this affects you.

I’m a MarinLit customer, will my access to MarinLit or access to user support change?

No, the way you use Marinlit is unchanged; continued support will to be provided by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

I’m a MarinLit customer, will my MarinLit licence costs change in the future?

Your MarinLit  licence terms are guaranteed for the duration of the licence period that you’ve purchased.

How can I access web MarinLit?

The web version of MarinLit is available at http://pubs.rsc.org/marinlit/

I have questions that aren’t answered here.

For any questions regarding renewing an existing subscription or setting up a new subscription, please email sales@rsc.org

For any other questions regarding MarinLit, please contact marinlit@rsc.org

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MarinLitBeta launched

We at the Royal Society of Chemistry are very proud to be working with MarinLit and have been working hard to develop an online version of this great product. We aim to deliver faster browsing, intelligent searching and more intuitive navigation in the new online database. We are therefore pleased to open up this new online version to existing MarinLit customers for beta testing.

The online version of MarinLit will allow you to
•    search across more than 24,000 compounds and 26,000 articles through one interface
•    draw your own structure and then search – or use molecular formulae to search
•    search by DOI and navigate straight to the article
•    use the flexible free text to search across title, date, issue, keywords, trivial names
•    quickly filter and refine your search results

Your feedback on the online version of MarinLit is very important to us. It will help us to make the site as useful and user-friendly as possible, while enhancing the functionality that is important to you. It couldn’t be easier to give feedback – simply click on the blue feedback button on the right-hand side of each screen to let us know what you think.

We will continue developing MarinLit through the beta period and beyond, so we will try and resolve any issues as soon as possible. You can find out about the changes in the latest release by looking in the Latest news section on the main page.

As we are still developing MarinLit, there are some issues that we are aware of and that we are working to resolve. These include:
•    MarinLit works best on up-to-date browsers, so you may need to check that you are running that latest version.
•    We are aware of some display issues in Internet Explorer 8. We are working to resolve this, but we would suggest viewing MarinLit in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Safari for best results.

We hope you find this new online version full of the great functionality you have come to expect from MarinLit, along with added benefit of online access.  If you have any questions, problems or suggestions, do contact us – we’d love to hear from you.

View the online version of MarinLit

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SpotOn 2012 – Or the Conference formally known as Science Online London

By Jack Rumble – ePublishing Specialist at the RSC
Twitter: @MrJackRumble

Science Online London, or SpotOn as it is now known, took place this year on the 11th and 12th of November. It aims to discuss and showcase current trends in online science communication. This attracts an enthusiastic and eclectic bunch of academics, writers, technologists and communicators. At this year’s conference there were three themes under the spotlight; technology, community and policy. The talks were varied, and reflected current industry trends and concerns in a thought provoking way.

This being the Technology blog, I thought it would be a good opportunity to go through some of my highlights and thoughts on all things tech from this year’s event.

Read more »

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Introduction to the Innovation Team:

By Jack Rumble: ePublishing Specialist at the RSC

Hello, and welcome to our new(ish) Innovation blog. I’m Jack Rumble, part of our Innovation and Technology team.

Working in publishing, for anybody even remotely interested in web technology, is exciting at the moment. We hope to explore and discuss some of the current trends in publishing and technology. As well as discussing some of the work we’re involved in.

Read more »

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Publishing Platform – Essential Maintenance Saturday 16th of June 8:30am – 9:30am UK Time

There will be a short period of essential downtime for the RSC Publishing Platform on Saturday the 16th of June 2012. We anticipate the downtime to be short but there is a risk it could result in services being unavailable between 8:30 and 9:30am UK Time. We apologise for any inconvenience.

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Cookies

At the RSC we utilise cookies to bring you the best possible experience on our web platforms.

We have audited all of our sites and produced a list of all cookies which can be found at http://www.rsc.org/Help/list-of-cookies.asp, we have also tried to explain the purpose of their use to help you to understand how we use this information to give you an improved experience.

If you have any questions or comments, please post them below and we will try to address them as soon as possible. If you want to get in touch you can also email us at technicalsupport@rsc.org.

We hope you find this information useful.

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New Platform Release – Multiple Downloader Tool

The latest updates to the RSC Publishing Platform have now gone live today including the Download Selected Files tool – an option on the Journal Issues tab allowing you to download multiple articles or a whole issue in just a couple of clicks.

Mulitple Downloader Tool

Each article has a tick box next to the article title, clicking the box selects the article. You can select a number of articles, or simply select the whole issue using the ‘Select All’ button.

Clicking the ‘Download’ button will open a separate window, you will then be prompted to run a Java applet which will load up the Multiple File downloader. To start the download you must first select a folder location. Once a folder is selected the applet window will automatically start downloading your selected articles. When all of the files have downloaded, simply close the applet window.

The Multiple Downloader tool runs on Java, and as a result you may initially be prompted to download the latest Java Runtime Environment (JRE). You can download the most up-to-date Runtime Environment which can be found on the Oracle.com website
GO TO http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html 

Updating Java

We plan to incorporate the Multiple Download button to other tabs and pages in addition to the Journal Issues tab in the near future. In the meantime we would welcome any comments or suggestions regarding the applet.

If you would like any additional support or feedback your suggestions, please contact Technical Support and we will happily help
EMAIL technicalsupport@rsc.org

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New Platform Release – with Patents returned from SureChemOpen

We have now gone live with the latest version of the RSC Publishing Platform with two new exciting additions to the functionality.

SureChemOpen Patent Linking

A selection of articles on the RSC Publishing Platform have a compound tab on the article landing page (we are actively working to increase the number of articles that have this feature). For those articles with a compound tab, you are able to link through to ChemSpider, and we have now added direct links to SureChemOpen, a suite of patent chemistry data. More information on this exciting development can be found on the ChemSpider blog post about the partnership with SureChemOpen.

Book Searching

We have now made it easier to search our ebook collection by offering a search box directly on the ebook landing page, and allowing you to browse the collection by ebook collection year – allowing you to see which books are available for different ebook years.

There is also much work going on behind the scenes: for our IOS app we will shortly be adding eBooks to the functionality, we’re working on author reprint functionality, and some other exciting developments that we will be able to share with you soon.

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RSC Publishing content is more discoverable

New agreements with Serials Solution Summon™, EBSCO Discovery Service™, ProQuest Illustrata™ and OCLC Worldcat.

RSC Publishing is pleased to announce new agreements for our content to be indexed in Serials Solution Summon™, EBSCO Discovery Service™, ProQuest Illustrata™ and OCLC Worldcat, aligned with our key priorities for discoverability of content.

RSC Publishing is taking major steps in partnering with third party solutions to make our content more discoverable. We have seen significant growth in high quality content – over 150% in the last three years and an average increase of 26% for content usage in 2011. 

To accommodate this growth,  we have made considerable technical advancements in the last few years including the new RSC Publishing Platform to help users search content, our award winning semantic technology and developments to ChemSpider (our free chemical database). Working with these third parties on the discoverability of content, helps us maintain the level of standard that our customers and users expect in accessing this high impact scientific content.

Stephen Hawthorne says, “RSC is fully committed to meeting the needs of our customers.  By supporting these discovery solutions and integrating RSC content into their service of choice, we are ensuring researchers, faculty and students can effectively reach our world-class scientific content“.

We will be announcing more agreements in 2012, sign up to the RSC Publishing Innovation blog RSS feed to receive the latest developments.

For any technical queries, please
EMAIL technicalsupport@rsc.org

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