Speed Improvement Patch: Release 4.3.4 and 4.3.5 of RSC Publishing Platform

Versions 4.3.4 and 4.3.5 of the RSC Publishing Platform were implemented today as patch releases. The following issues that were reported by users have been resolved or improved:

  1. Speed Improvements have been made by separating the calls to our authentication service into a new system queue. Separating the service in this way has removed the slower authentication tasks from the services delivering content. The number of calls to our authentication service from the article delivery pages have also been halved, significantly reducing some bottlenecks with authentication. Some speed issues are still under investigation, notably with the pages that list journals and issues.
    We are very grateful to all our users who reported the problems and helped us investigate the issues.  We apologise for the poor performance of our platform over the past few weeks. We have spent these past weeks investigating the bottlenecks discussed above. We are continuing to monitor performance and will be optimising the system further over the coming days and weeks.  Thank you again to everyone who logged the slow platform speed as a performance issue.
  2. The last two Advance Articles no longer repeat when you view the next page of Advance Articles.
  3. Special characters (e.g. ü and ö) in any search terms, including compound synonyms from ChemSpider, were breaking the search and returning too many records. This has been fixed.
  4. Author Name(s) that contain subscript and superscript (as well as other mark up) should now display correctly (e.g. McGinitie). Also fixed that the affected author names appear correctly in citation manager RIS formats.
  5. Fixed cover images on page that delivers Accepted Manuscripts for Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry.
  6. Fixed cover images for newer journals which have not yet published any issues. (Catalysis Science & Technology, Food & Function).
  7. The eAlerts subscription links now direct to our old site as users that had previously registered on the old site were not able to manage their subscriptions correctly when this was migrated to the new platform.
  8. Fixed authentication issues that stopped some users accessing some eBooks that are part of a book series.
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PDF compound galleries

Another way of putting our award-winning markup into PDFs (see earlier), we’re using the structure drawing capabilities of ChemSpider to produce compound galleries here and here.  We’ve sorted the compounds by relevance into three broad categories, primary, secondary and routine.

What we’d really like is some feedback on how we can make this most useful for you, the reader. Here are some questions:

  • Is it more useful to have the compound gallery at the front, as a sort of index page, or at the back?
  • Currently we’re showing the routine compounds (solvents, drying agents and the like). Do we need to do this at all?
  • Is the article PDF even the best place for this? Would it be better to have a PDF for each issue, or for the current advance articles, or something else entirely?

Do let us know in the comments below!

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Announcing launch of Release 4.3.3 of RSC Publishing Platform

Version 4.3.3 of the Publishing Platform has been implemented as patch release to resolve the following issues reported by users.

  1. ‘Find an issue’ now works for journals that contain an ‘&’ in the title, e.g. Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry.
  2. New user registrations for personal accounts were suspended last week. The new accounts were registered on the database but were not correctly activated,  meaning that users had a fully registered but inactive account, with no way to activate the account. This system failure has been fixed and the affected accounts made activeRegistration for personal accounts has now been reactivated. Apologies to our users for the frustration that this issue caused.
  3. Fixed broken linking from the journal name in the issue listing to the journal homepage.
  4. Access via Shibboleth is now implemented,  enabling us to redirect dx.doi.org links to the new platform in the near future.
  5. Graphical Abstracts will now start to load on the first screen, not only when you start to scroll.
  6. Mail sent will contain a full list of the IP address changes requested by a librarian.
  7. Users are now reminded of their user name when they request a forgotten password.
  8. URL for ‘More About This Journal’  that appears on journal hompages now points to the correct URL.
  9. Changed link name from ‘Catalogues’ to ‘Products and Pricing’ in Librarians Portal.
  10. Character mapping issues reported for Advance Article c0sm00377h (Soft Matter) were fixed.
  11. Disabled the pay-per-view option for Advance articles when a PDF was not available for purchase.
  12. Current journals listing now delivered as one web page, rather than two (Soft Matter had been pushed to Page 2).
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PDFs enhanced with XMP

Our readers still read most of our articles on the web as PDFs rather than HTML, so we thought we’d experiment with making some of our award-winning Prospect markup available through PDFs as well as through HTML.

Our first experiment is with XMP, a format which has hitherto mainly been used for metadata in photographs. We’re including compound data as InChIs, specifically pointers to the RSC InChI resolver, and incorporating other entities of interest with reference to OBO and RSC ontologies.

Examples, and instructions for how to see what we’ve included with an ordinary PDF viewer, available here: http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/ProjectProspect/Examples.asp

They’re not really intended to be directly read by human beings; we’d anticipate that these will be picked up and indexed by search engines or desktop search, and that people will use Adobe’s SDK to extract the data into a triplestore where it can be reasoned over.

We should also acknowledge that Omer Casher and Henry Rzepa at Imperial College London were experimenting with XMP back in 2006, and that NPG’s Tony Hammond has been blogging extensively on this subject on the CrossTech blog.

More experiments soon, but do let us know what you think in the comments below!

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RSC Publishing Platform Launched Today!

RSC Publishing platform enables searches across all RSC-hosted journal, database and book content published from 1841 to the present day, through one simple search.

RSC PUBLISHING PLATFORM LAUNCHED TODAY!

 * * * Please forward this email to your colleagues * * *

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RSC Publishing platform enables searches across all RSC-hosted journal, database and book content published from 1841 to the present day, through one simple search.

In 2010, we launched the RSC Publishing beta site to help direct our development of the platform, before we released our final version today. We continually enhanced the beta version of our platform to improve usability and included three releases with many of your requested enhancements. Now we have launched the new RSC Publishing platform. After launch, we will continue to release updated versions dependent on functionality requested and development.

Our new platform, RSC Publishing, is more user experience driven. The existing Librarians Portal has been developed to offer more functionality and tools specifically for librarians and information specialists. We have chosen the end of July to launch RSC Publishing to allow minimal disruption to our international academic community

For more information on

Migration www.rsc.org/migration
Librarians Portal www.rsc.org/librarians
RSC Publishing Platform  www.rsc.org/publishing

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RSC PUBLISHING PLATFORM TIMESCALES

July 27th 2010

* RSC Publishing platform launched
* All dynamic linking to content will be set to resolve to the new platform
* The RSC Publishing platform and the old website will run in parallel alongside each other to give our customers time to highlight any broken links for several months
* Where possible, website redirects will be put in place to reduce errors for customers
* Please check that the links you currently use for journals and books are correct in your knowledgebase. For the list of URLS
GO TO www.rsc.org/urls
* Set up an individual Librarians Portal account for each relevant librarian/information specialist at your institution/organisation
GO TO www.rsc.org/librarians

By the end of 2010**

* Set up at least one Librarians Portal account for institution/organisation
GO TO www.rsc.org/librarians
* Make sure all your IP addresses are registered on Librarians Portal
* When pointing to other pages on our website (journal homepages etc) please use the recommended shortcuts (e.g., rsc.org/chemcomm) rather than the full URL (e.g. rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/cc/index.asp)
GO TO www.rsc.org/urls
* Our COUNTER statistics customers will access statistics through the Librarians Portal once we shut off access to the old site
* We will remove access to content via the old website once there are minimal redirects measured. We anticipate this to be in several months
* Change any links not covered by Xlink on www.rsc.org/urls
* Please make sure you add this new link to your EZProxy – pubs.rsc.org

**Dates subject to change

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CUSTOMER SUPPORT

* Userguide will be available in PDF form after launch
* Migration guidelines GO TO www.rsc.org/migration
* We will give access to screen shots that can be used for presentations and internal end user training
* Presentation training will be taking place from August to October through webcasts or by the Sales team on visits

Technical Support  – technicalsupport@rsc.org
Customer Support and Sales – sales@rsc.org

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COMMUNICATIONS

* We will provide text for you to send out to faculty and colleagues of the new platform
* Migration updates will be sent to RSC Publishing Platform Update email subscribers, to register send your name, institution and email address to peckl@rsc.org
* Listed in the news section of the Librarians Portal
* Included on listservs where relevant (e.g. LIS-E-RESOURCES, CHMINF-L, SERIALST and LIS-SCITECH)
* If you would like messaging adding to any other Librarian/Information Specialist listserv, please forward listserv name and email to peckl@rsc.org
* Reporting any new developments, known issues and downtime will be done via the news section on the Librarians Portal and messaging through RSC Publishing Platform Update, to register send your name, institution and email address to peckl@rsc.org
* Any planned downtime will be communicated within a two week notice period
* Standard Table of Contents email alerts for journals, databases and the eBook Collection will continue with no change

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

For more information on

Migration www.rsc.org/migration
Librarians Portal www.rsc.org/librarians
RSC Publishing Platform www.rsc.org/publishing

If you would like further customer or technical support

EMAIL sales@rsc.org
EMAIL technicalsupport@rsc.org

Thank you for your time.

Kind regards

Louise

Louise Peck, Library Marketing Specialist
Royal Society of Chemistry, Thomas Graham House,
Science Park, Cambridge, CB4 0WF, UK

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Announcing launch of Release 4.3.0 of RSC Publishing Platform

New release in preparation for migration on 27th July.

  • Change URLs for journal homepages from Journals/Journal to Journals/JournalIssues to enable browse navigation on journal homepages to remember there suers had navigated to.
  • RSC Publishing Platform Migration” added to Librarian portal.
  • Food & Function added to  eAlerts page.
  • For journals with no issues journal cover image was not displayed.
  • Reverted SSL changes made in release 4.2 (not implemented).
  • On journal landing page all graphical abstracts were getting loaded at page load. The expected behaviour was that  images should load when user scrolls. This has been fixed.
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Announcing launch of Release 4.1.0 of RSC Publishing Platform

New functionality:


Home Page:

  • New simplified design, featuring books and journals tab.
  • A new menu option named “More” is added to give access to other content types.
  • Compound search (redirected to ChemSpider).
  • News feeds from improved blog site based on improved blogging service.

Journal Landing page:

  • New issue navigation.
New browse navigation for issues

Search Results:

  • New tab named “Non-RSC Articles” is added to display A&I content from RSC databases
  • Search term is retained in URL, e.g. http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Results?SearchText=supercritical%20fluids
  • Book and Chapter landing pages:

    • Related Articles section improved.

    Librarian portal:

    • Design Change.
    • Open URL configuration.

    Article landing page:

    • Design Change.
    • Open URL links implemented for Books and Journals (Non-RSC content to follow).
    • Related Articles section improved

    User Profile:

    • Page to edit librarian details.

    Article collection landing page:

    • Design change.

    New pages:

    • Page for federated access.

    Issues Resolved:

    • In IE6 some pages such as Chapter landing page, edit librarian details right hand side navigation region was broken.
    • Author Character Mapping broken in RIS Format.
    • User was not able to submit the form due to wrong country field validation.
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    Now rolling out PDF versions of Advance Articles

    One of your most requested developments for the RSC Content Platform has been to have access to journal Advance Articles in PDF format. We have started to roll this out across journals, beginning with Chemical Science, where all Advance Articles are now available as both PDF and as Rich HTML. 

    Advance Articles as PDF
    Advance Articles can now be accessed in PDF format

    There are a few issues at the moment with accessing the PDFs from some of the Article Homepages, but all the PDF links work correctly from the Journal Homepage. Advance Articles will be available as PDFs for all other journals over the coming weeks, as soon as these can be rolled out. Please continue to leave your suggestions for development, via the feedback link at the top of the platform site.

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    RSC Publishing platform launch and migration

    The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) would like to announce our migration plans for the new RSC Publishing platform and how this will affect our customers.

    After successfully launching the RSC Publishing ‘beta’ platform, which gave students, researchers, scientists, librarians and information specialists access to the platform in test stage, we have been continually developing the platform for release.  Thank you to those of you that have fed back during this process, your input has been very valuable to us and we will continue to keep our Librarian Testers involved in future developments.


    Launch of the new RSC Publishing platform


    Timelines

    • July 27th 2010* – RSC Publishing platform will be launched
    • All dynamic links to content will be set to resolve to the new platform
    • The RSC Publishing platform and the old website will run in parallel alongside each other to give our customers time to highlight any broken links and amend as necessary – please read the legacy URL column and short cut URL column notes
      GO TO www.rsc.org/urls
    • Where possible, website redirects will be put in place to reduce errors for customers
    • We will remove access to content via the old website once there are minimal redirects measured. We anticipate this to be in several months
    • Our COUNTER statistics customers will access statistics through the Librarians’ Portal once we close off access to the old site
    • All our customers to set up an individual Librarians’ Portal account on new platform before old website access closed
      GO TO http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Librarian

    *Please note that timescales are approximate and may be subject to change


    Customer Support

    • Training – we will be organising webcasts throughout July to October
    • Communications – we will continue to keep our customers up-to-date with migration, training and planned maintenance through the Librarians’ Portal news and to registered email addresses

    Technical Support

    • Migration guidelines – we are currently producing migration guidelines to help our customers to transition over to the new RSC Publishing platform, these will be available shortly
    • We will be using Xlink to redirect all our links – please ensure you check any direct URLs do not have the format rsc.org/publishing… as these will become broken and will need to be changed
    • For a full list or URLs (please read the legacy URL column and short cut URL column notes)
      GO TO www.rsc.org/urls

    More detailed information will be provided including the migration guidelines shortly.

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    Announcing launch of Release 3.1.0 of RSC Publishing Platform

    Bugs fixed in this release:

    • The RSS feed for a saved search does not work.
    • An error page is displayed when user clicks on the front cover of the journal in the issue navigation.
    • On librarian registration page address field should accept commas & post code should accept spaces.
    • Incorrect results are displayed when user searches for journal name & year in ‘Find an Issue’ section on journal home page.

    Other changes:

    • Description of theme is now displayed on article collection landing page.
    • Navigation on user registration page is removed.
    • Issue with reference manager download have been fixed.
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