On Thursday 18th April we went live with the latest release of our publishing platform, pubs.rsc.org. We are really pleased to announce some pretty significant changes to the platform, and would like to say a big well done to all our colleagues involved getting this release ready to go live.
There are a number of changes to the functionality of the pages, as well as some restructuring of the way store information and data behind the scenes.
The functionality included in this release:
- Re-styling of our Journal banners to include additional information about each journal such as the impact factor and number issues published per year. This will make the information available to search engines, making it more discoverable.
- The addition of an information point on the right hand side of our journals pages. This provides useful links through to author and referee resources from one easy-to-find location. Currently these link to pages on rsc.org, but we are looking at pulling these pages into pubs.rsc.org in the near future.
- Improved navigation on the Recent Articles tab; in addition to a feed of both Accepted Manuscripts and Advanced Articles, we have enabled the ability to filter to view just Accepted Manuscripts or just Advanced Articles.
- Improved ‘Show Affiliations’ button allowing you to copy author names and affiliations more easily. Clicking on an author name now takes you to a search page of all RSC articles and chapters by that author. We now highlight the corresponding author(s) and we have added more author contact information where available.
- Inclusion of Subject categorisation in Chemical Communications to allow easy navigation and discovery of articles in a particular subject area of interest.
- Send to Kindle; on each article landing page, as well as options to read PDF and Rich HTML versions of our articles and book chapters, we have included functionality which allows you to email articles and chapters directly to your Kindle device using the Amazon Personal Document Service.
- Updated design of our book landing pages, which now includes tabbed navigation to Author Information and Related Content.
- Highlighting related Themed Collections more prominently on our article landing pages. We create Themed Collections to aggregate articles on particular themes. Including an article in a collection also adds a link back to the collection from the article landing page. Each collection link on our article landing pages is now highlighted by the addition of a light blue background.
Redesigned Journal landing page on Chemical Communications
In addition to the improvements to our article, journal and chapter landing pages we have been working on improving the way we store the data at the heart of the publishing platform, this has been a long project, but the key thing here is to improve the overall performance. You might not see a significant benefit immediately since there is much more work to be done. But hopefully in the next few months there will be noticeable changes to the overall site performance.
As always, we’d love to hear what you think. Please post a message in the forums below or tweet me @MrJackRumble
