RSC Publishing Innovation

For today only,  we have reduced the number of articles that appear on each page of the content lists for journals. We are testing the effect this change has on site performance (speed) and will return to the normal listings tomorrow. Apologies for any inconvenience this test may cause.

You may notice that articles for an issue of a journal may now appear on two or more pages, when before they normally were listed on a single page.

Institutional branding  has been removed from the RSC Publishing Platform as part of our investigations into intermittent performance issues that have been causing slow access speeds over the past five days. The branding will be restored as soon as possible, hopefully by 23rd March.

This update provides new and improved functionality for the RSC Publishing Platform: 

Improved Issue Navigation on Journal Homepages

Following your feedback, we have introduced a new journal navigation based on dropdown menus for Decade, Year/Volume and Issue.  These options provide a clearer way of navigating within the journal that you are browsing. Many of our journals have complex histories of name changes over the past 50 years and these name changes are reflected in a new Related Journals section, below the dropdown boxes. For some journals where there is a clear continuity of naming (such as Chemical Communications) we will be working to make all the years of the journal browsable from one set of dropdowns.  However, where there has been a name change (such as for Journal of the Chemical Society, Perkin Transactions 1 and 2, which merged to become Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry in 2003) then these journals will continue to be listed as related and to have separate dropdownnavigations. We are already working on improving this aspect of  navigation for a future release.

View our ‘Most Read’ Journal Articles

Check out our new ‘Most Read Articles’ tab, which lists the top 15 articles in each of our current journals. We are currently showing the most read articles covering 30 days, but we will soon reduce this period for our journals that have weekly issues.  View the most read articles on Chemical Science, Chemical Communications and Chemical Society Reviews.

Print Views for Journal Contents Lists

We now provide a choice of print views for contents listings. For issue contents lists we provide the PDF of the contents pages (commonly 6-8 pages) and a new compact print view, accessed by the new button.  For Advance Articles the new print view is provided by our RSS Feeds (via Feedburner). View the print view of the latest issue of Chemical Science and for the Advance Articles for Chemical Science.

Open URL implemented on Journal Article HTML

If your institution/organisation has registered their OpenURL server on our Platform, you can now follow OpenURL links from the references at the end of our HTML journal articles. The links direct you to the recommended source for the content, via your institution/organisation’s OpenURL service. 

New Mobile Pages launched

Today we launched a new mobile homepages for the RSC Publishing Platform. The hompage is a simple, fast listing of our current and archive journals, enabling users from mobile devices to quickly access the latest issues and advance articles. We also launched a new tab for browsing back issues of  journals.

This update includes further performance improvements and improved functionality for the RSC Publishing Platform:    

Book landing page    

1. Design change have been made to show which chapters you have access to through colour coding. Colours are green for full access and white for no access. This will be changed to white for ‘pay per view access’ in the future. A future category of ‘not available’ may also be added in the future for books or chapters that we do not have the rights to distribute online, but wish to list on the book pages. This will allow us to have a single book shop online (and remove our old online catalogue of print titles). View an example book page.
   

   Book chapters now show whether you have access to each chapter.

2. Related Book Chapters and Related Journal Articles sections added, to showcase similar content available from the site.

Book chapter landing page   

1. Each chapter landing page now displays the first paragraph from the chapter if an abstract of the chapter is not available, which is the case for books up to 2010. View an example chapter page.
2. Related Chapters and Related Articles section has been improved,  to showcase similar content available from the site.

Find an Issue   

The ‘Find an Issue’ service now copes better with invalid combinations of Journal Names,  Issue Numbers or Years and attempts to display suggestions to help  you find the content you are searching for.  

Journal Landing Page   

The  issue navigation section for journal issues was simplified and tided up.    

 Citation Download for BibTeX   

 Download citation in BibTeX format now correctly delivers a BibTeX file, where previously a generic  .RIS format was downloaded. 

Personal User Profiles    

1. Usability improvements were made to the Favorites section. This function allows you to store favourite articles (at the moment by DOI) in your personal user profile. This function will developed to interface with mobile access at a future date. 
2. Improvements were made to the account activation email messages. 

Improvements to Simple Search   

Entering a journal name on its own in the simple search box on each page will now direct you to the journals homepage, rather than search all content for that search text. Try now for Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry (http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Results?SearchText=obc)   

Mobile Browser and Non-Javascript pages   

New pages are now available for viewing the platform on mobile browsers, such as iPhone. Mobile views are available for article landing pages and login pages at the moment, allowing you to follow links directly to a page designed for the mobile view.  The following pages have been implemented:  

1. Article landing page
2. Personal User Profile login page
3. Subscriber login page 

You can view full-text of any free content available to you via your personal user account on a mobile device, and also have full access if you are within your institution’s registered IP range. Register for a personal user account. 

Implemented OpenURL for Non-RSC Content     

Links to ‘Non-RSC Content’ are links to articles outside of the RSC Publishing Platform. These links come from RSC abstract and indexing databases and help direct you to other content of interest. Subscribers to the RSC abstracts and indexing databases can view additional details of the records.  You can now link to the source records via OpenURL if this has been implemented by your institution. Try this example to see whether OpenURL has been set up for your institution. To set up OpenURL linking your librarian should register the following in our Librarians Portal: base URL of your OpenURL  server,  Open URL image file. 

Bug fixes: 

1. Fixed: Some users with Google Toolbar installed were directed to the Google Robots page, instead of the human interface.
2. Article abstracts with multiple paragraphs now display correctly.
3. Fixed: .RIS export was broken for multiple exports that contained both book chapters and journal articles.
4. Some special characters were breaking the site search, such as ‘&’.

Our next upgrade of the RSC Publishing Platform is scheduled for Tuesday 12th October  from 08:00 – 09:00 UTC (convert this to your local time).  During this period the platform will continue to be available, however,  there may be some interruption to service.

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.

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 active.  Registration 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).

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.

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.

Search Results:

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.