Saturday, April 24, 2010

Cell's Article of the Future












Those who attended NewsMorphosis and heard Temple's keynote on the vision for Peer News may be interested in Cell's "Article of the Future" initiative.

Their approach also features a non-linear approach to presenting information. For the most part, the information is the same, but the format offers a graphical abstract, allows new ways of filtering references, and with each figure, you can either see the caption or its context in the article. A video with two of the authors gives a 5 minute presentation of their research, though I don't know if Cell expects this from all researchers. For me, the advertising felt more intrusive, since the content is no longer a big block, but when I switched to the full-screen view, it wasn't a problem. I'm not sure how they handle searchability; it may be necessary to search within each of the tabs, but perhaps I just need to explore this a little more...

If this becomes standard, I think this could really help people understand research articles more quickly. Also, if you scroll down on Cell's Beta site, you can see some of their past efforts to make information more accessible.


http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2010/04/cell_gives_sneak_peek_at_article_of_the_future_1.html

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