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

                  

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.

If you’re really keen many of these presentations were recorded, and are due to be hosted on the SpotOn pages, so I encourage you to take a look.

Impact

There were a number of sessions this year dedicated to measuring ones impact online, in particular social impact. A recent article by the Scholarly Kitchen raises some important and valid points regarding altmetrics. At the heart of the matter being discussed at SpotOn was; how to demonstrate the impact of your research in the wider research community.

A panel discussion; on ways to encourage collaboration and build an online presence, touched on an important point regarding whether there is a benefit to investing time in building a strong social presence online to communicate ones research. Building an online presence takes time and effort, as does building a network of contacts anywhere. There is strong evidence to suggest that once this network is established that dissemination of content becomes much more targeted and therefore your audience is more likely to read, or engage with your content.

Initiatives run by universities to encourage researchers to discuss research online more openly have been embraced by many attending the session, but have also caused some concern. Many researchers in the audience expressed reluctance to communicate their research openly since they were concerned about exposing their research to competitors, or even inhibit their chances of publishing work since they’ve already discussed this online. I think this is a really important point, in any industry where you are actively encouraged to speak openly about your work; there is no guidance about what you should or shouldn’t say. And where there is ambiguity about the impact and repercussions for actions, it isn’t surprising that many attending the session challenged the notion that there is a benefit to being vocal about their research.

Personally I think that it’s more to do with the tools you are comfortable using. Research is often difficult to communicate to those in a similar field even, and finding a voice online is equally abstract, so maybe writing a blog post, or a few tweets, to some seems like time ill-spent, especially with all of the other tasks requiring attention. To others it has been a really effective way of targeting the communication of their research to a group of peers in the same field of research. An experiment conducted by Mellissa Terras from UCL documents using a twitter stream to increase downloads, the results strongly suggested a correlation, but what Dr Terras also states is that building up the network of contacts was no small task.

At the RSC we encourage the micro-publication of protocols on our ChemSpider synthetic pages. These protocols can be published as part of a subsequent paper so long as the original protocol did not discuss the underlying chemistry, this gives researchers a novel focused channel to communicate their protocols early on in the research process. Mark Hahnel from Figshare also remarked that users are frequently uploading different types of content such as Conference Posters, as well as the traditional article figures. In terms of social impact being able to communicate outcomes at all points of the research cycle could lead to a much richer dialogue. What are your thoughts? Are the correct tools out there to enable you to talk about your research effectively? What sort of guidance would give you more confidence to discuss your research and comment on others?

Tools and applications:

This year Digital Science also ran a Hack Day which I was unfortunately unable to attend – if anyone knows of similar events in the near future, please let me know in the comments below! The purpose was to try and build applications related to the research. The three apps presented were built using a couple of API’s and RSS feeds to deliver content in a more intuitive way. An API can essentially be thought of a way of accessing somebody else’s data, to use for your own purposes. Merging a number of API’s together often creates really useful applications since you are able to provide new context to your research.

The results of the Hack day were great, one group spliced the newly released ORCID API with a Wordpress application to automatically update a researchers own homepage. Another used an API to deliver comments and highlighted data directly to the article landing page. It was inspiring to see that these applications were built by people from a non-developer background. They simply saw a problem and thought about how they could solve it in a simple and innovative way.

I’m really interested in finding novel applications and mash-ups, one of my favourites at the moment is the If This Then That which uses a plethora of API’s to allow you to set up your own bespoke notification services.

This got me thinking; we use a lot of API’s to deliver content across sub-domains on the RSC web pages, if we opened up data for others to use, what could developers build with it. What data are people trying to get hold of, or would like to get hold of? If you’ve any thoughts it’d be great to hear from you.

                  

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.

We’re very receptive to new ideas, working with new people, and generally having a chin-wag about tech. So please don’t be shy, pop a comment in the box below, or catch me on twitter (@MrJackRumble).

Our team looks after the continued development of the publishing platform, as well as looking after other projects. This leads us to explore many new technologies, which for a group of tech-heads like us is quite fun.

Marblar:

Now that the introductions are out of the way I’d like to use this as an opportunity to announce the RSC’s collaboration with Marblar.

Finding, or even recognising, the potential application for an invention is difficult. It often requires tenacity, serendipity, passion and commitment. But even then, that might not be enough. Sometimes the invention has a different application from its original intended use, and it takes a bit of luck to realise this. The Post-It note for example was an accidental product of a reaction to create a super-strong adhesive performed by Dr Spencer Silver, an American chemist working at the 3M laboratories. It wasn’t until a friend of Dr Silver suggested using the adhesive as a temporary bookmark that the canary yellow product ever came into existence.

An Oxford University spinout called Marblar estimates that almost 95% of technology coming out of university never gets converted to a real world application. The result of much of this technological endeavour is to collect dust. And they intend to change this by encouraging researchers to upload their ideas, and ask the wider community to offer suggestions on potential uses.

Marblar posts these unused technologies in the form of challenges that ask scientists from around the world to find clever new applications. The crowdsourcing platform was founded by four PhD students, and offers prizes to Marblars (thinkers) in the form of points (marbles), prizes and even cash rewards.

The RSC is sponsoring several Marblar challenges, based on research in RSC journals. The first two technologies seeking commercial applications are:

• SlipChip – a microfluidic device designed to perform multiplexed microfluidic reactions without pumps or valve (Lab on a Chip, 2009)
• Correlative Light-Ion Microscopy (CLIM) – a new technique that correlates SEM-like micrographs with fluorescence images (Nanoscale, 2012)

These challenges were launched on Monday 29 October for three weeks, with just under a week left to get entries in!

Thoughts and points of view welcome. And good luck Marblars!

Stay tuned for more, but for now I just wanted to introduce myself.

Thanks,

Jack

                  

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.

                  

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 

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

                  

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.

                  

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

                  

As well as improved meta-data on article pages to increase our discoverability in Google Scholar, other developments include:

Author Affiliations Can now be viewed from the article landing pages – just hover over an author’s name to see the pop up window. Please note not available for Advance Articles and Accepted Manuscripts.
More content by authors or articles View more content by authors or articles by selecting the authors name on the right hand side.
Check Full Text Access After performing a search, check which articles you have full text access to using a ‘Check Access’ button. Please note that this may take a moment to complete this process.
RSC Open Science RSC Open Science articles are labelled on the article landing page.

If you have any technical queries, please
EMAIL technicalsupport@rsc.org

                  

RSC Publishing is pleased to announce after the success of the free RSC Mobile app for iOS, we have now launched the free Android version.  Released ahead of schedule in December 2011, the Android version was sent to users who expressed an interest in trialling the app and providing feedback for any further developments. 

This has now been completed and we can now officially launch the app to the marketplace.

For more information on RSC Mobile
GO TO www.rsc.org/rscmobile

or to download click on the logos below:

If you are interested in helping RSC Publishing with future developments, have any feedback or require technical assistance, please
EMAIL technicalsupport@rsc.org

What is RSC Mobile?

RSC Mobile provides readers with access to search more than 30 RSC journals from our RSC Publishing Platform.

If your institution/organisation pays for RSC journals, then you can access exactly the same content on this app using your institutions/organisations wireless network.

RSC Mobile includes:

• Up-to-the-minute access to RSC journals 
• Full text HTML and PDF access via wireless networks for subscribing institutions/organisations 
• The latest news from our RSC Publishing Platform 
• Saving articles for offline reading 
• Share your favourite content via email, Twitter or Facebook    

For more information on the RSC Mobile app and to download on iTunes or Android Market
GO TO www.rsc.org/rscmobile

“Great app! It makes it dead simple to be up-to-date with your research areas of interest.
Easy to use, very flexible search, permits direct off-line saving of abstracts or papers, plus sharing your results with your colleagues (via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter) is just one-button away.
A must for any chemist!”

Martín Resano Ezcaray, University of Zaragoza, Spain

Sign up to the RSC Publishing Innovation RSS feed to keep up-to-date with future developments.

You may also find of interest the new free ChemSpider app which is available on iTunes