RSC Publishing Innovation

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. M^cGinitie). 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.