Archive for August, 2010

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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