RSC Publishing Innovation

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.

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.

New functionality:

Article Landing page: 

• Article landing page design changes to display citation (forward linking) in new Tab.
• Displaying theme information on article landing page for articles belonging to theme issue or web collection.
• Added navigation to take user to back to search results.
• Link for navigating to Partner society landing page if journal belongs to one or more societies.

Journal Landing page:

• Theme tab added for journals having Theme issues/collections.
• Content list on Issue tab are displayed in sections based on theme title and article types.
• Link for navigating to Partner society landing page if journal belongs to one or more societies.
• Displayed theme metainfo for each article if they belong to a theme,
• Validation changes in issue finder issue no field.
• Values in Issue finder are pre-populated.
• Changed issue navigation links.
• Maintaining tab state and pagination when user navigates back to JLP.

Custom eAlerts and RSS feeds: 

• User can subscribe to custom eAlerts and RSS feeds from My Saved searches page.

User Profile:

• Design changes, removed tabs and added right hand side navigations.
• Implemented change password functionality.
• When user updates email address confirmation mail is sent to confirm email address change. Once user confirms then only email id gets updated in database.

Search Result:

• Displayed theme metainfo for each article if they belong to a theme,
• Providing hyperlink on Journal name for each article.
• Maintaining tab state and pagination when user navigates back to search result.

Journal Home page: 

• Decade start and end year are set to start and end year of Journal.

New pages: 

• Article collection landing page.
• Partner societies admin page.
• Journal and Partner society mapping admin page.
• Partner society landing page.

Bugs fixed in this release:

• My Saved searches: Saved search content records are not getting deleted.
• “In partnership with ..” link is not getting displayed for ‘Chemical Science’even if the association is created for it.
• Change Password:  The messages are not cleared when “Clear” button is clicked.
• Change Password: Page load error page is displayed when the user is idle for sometime after loggin in.
• Article Landing Page – Login Details looks to be associated with abstract.
• Also include Zotero, CiteULike, Connotea in ref download options (as well as Ref Mgr etc)
• Special characters (like ‘-‘ ; ‘,’) should be allowed in eBook title, Chapter title, series title field as per RSC data.

Known issues:  

• Scroll position on Search result and Journal landing Page is maintained only in Firefox.
• For new links added on librarian portal there are no CMS pages so for all the pages Privacy policy page is displayed.

New functionality:

• RSC Search API.
• Enable/Disable PDF link for advance articles on Article landing and Search result page based on PDF exist flag.
• Issue navigation on Journal Home Page.
• Display of Theme issue name in Issue navigation on Journal Home Page and on Journal Landing Page (Issue Tab).
• Forward linking on Article landing page.
• Accepted Manuscripts displayed on Advance Article Tab.

Bugs fixed in this release:

• Admin is not able enter any Job Position which is less than 3 or more than 15 characters.
• The comma is displayed on a new line for serach results of DOI:10.1039/B918390F.
• The length of the carousels text to describe the journals should be increased on home page.
• On site home page blog entry links become and stay underlined once they have been visited.
• Alignment is poor on landing page for DOI:for SA9741100310 on IE7, IE8.
• The heading text is getting displayed as – Browse by Title: New Title. s is missing.
• User can’t read the names on the ‘Institution Name’ dropdown menu in IE6.
• Advance Articles not appearing in UI if there is only one Adv Article for a Journal.
• ‘Phone Number’ field is not accepting any special chars like + and also not accepting any number more than 14 chars.
• Error message as – “Invaild Journal name” is displayed for journal name with “A” in Journal field.
• Page not found error is displayed when user clicks PDF link on chapter landing page.
• Books home page: No results displayed when browsed by Subject area.
• eAlert registration issue.