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There is general consensus in the publishing community that online documents have too long been like yesterday’s paper—flat, lifeless, inactive. For many years, we have been trying to move away from ‘paper under glass’ and reconceptualise scholarly output using the technologies available now.

Elsevier have invested significant time in their Article of the Future project, many have experimented with semantic publishing, and services such as Utopia Docs have attempted to breathe new life into PDFs. Now the innovative open access journal, eLife, has released a new tool in the hope of making articles easier to read online for researchers, authors and editors alike: eLife Lens.

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This week has seen a flurry of activity on Twitter owing to a series of separate but related events highlighting trends in scholarly communication and research data. The fun kicked off with Wednesday’s ‘Now and Future of Data Publishing’ event organised by the Jisc Managing Research Data programme. It was followed on Thursday by the  ORCID Outreach Meeting, Getting Credit for Your Work: A Symposium on Research Attribution (jointly organised by Dryad and ORCID) and concludes with today’s Dryad Membership Meeting.

An obvious but important message that underpinned discussions on all three days was the importance of sharing data.  On the first morning, Simon Hodson of Jisc quoted Geoffrey Boulton of the Royal Society (who have made sharing data a condition of publication): “Publishing articles without making the data available is scientific malpractice.” This is an extreme but not uncommon view.

Trish Groves, deputy editor of the BMJ, recently wrote a summary of recent and future developments around sharing clinical data. The big news our end is that we now require authors of drug and devices trials to deposit their anonymised patient level data—on reasonable request. However, our interest in data publication started back in 2009 when we first incorporated data sharing statements into all BMJ research papers. More recently, we have encouraged our authors to deposit their data in Dryad and the first article to link through to a Dryad dataset was published by BMJ Open in 2011. We now have just under 40 papers with links to datasets on Dryad. more…

The Article of the Future project is Elsevier’s “never-ending quest to explore better ways to create and deliver the formal published record”.

In the latest phase of this ‘quest’, the project team have worked with more than 150 researchers, authors, publishers and editors to come up with multiple prototypes for a new article design, with each one tailored to a specific subject area.

Following previous changes to improve in-article navigation and readability, all ScienceDirect articles have now been transformed using an interactive HTML5 format. Click here to see one in action.

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Article-level metrics (or ALMs) were a hot topic at this week’s HighWire publisher meeting in Washington. (Highwire hosts both the BMJ and its stable of 42 specialist journals). From SAGE to eLife, publishers seem sold on the benefits of displaying additional context to articles, thereby enabling readers to assess their impact. These statistics range from traditional indicators, such as usage statistics and citations, to alternative values (or altmetrics) like mentions on Twitter and in the mainstream media.

So, what services are available to bring this information together in one simple interface? There are quite a few contenders in this area, including Plum Analytics, PLoS Article-Level Metrics application, Science Card, CitedIn and ReaderMeter. One system in particular has received a good deal of attention in the past few weeks; ImpactStory, a relaunched version of total-impact. It’s a free, open-source webapp that’s been built with financial help from the Sloan Foundation (and others) “to help researchers uncover data-driven stories about their broader impacts”.

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Following the launch of BMJ Portfolio earlier in the year, ‘Add to portfolio’ links have been rolled out across all articles in our suite of specialist journals.

Located in the right-hand column of the article page, these links make it even easier to track, record, plan and report on your continuing professional development.

So, for those of you that missed the introductory blog post, what is BMJ Portfolio?

It’s a tool doctors can use for recording their own needs, activities and notes relating to keeping up to date with medicine – continual professional development, or CPD, as it’s known. Why would doctors use BMJ Portfolio rather than the back of an envelope or an Excel spreadsheet?

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User rating is a very common feature of websites, whether for films, books, washing machines or blog posts. What these user rating systems allow is a quick and easy survey of a community opinion. Despite the obvious advantages to busy readers trying to get to grips with a vast amount of literature, this simple system hasn’t been much applied to scholarly papers. PLoS notably introduced their rating five star system back in 2007, which has had a mixed response from the publishing community and a low rate of participation.

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“Hello David Payne. We have recommendations for you.” Think of online recommendations and Amazon springs to mind. The store that started with books, launched the Kindle e-reader, and is now the Internet’s answer to John Lewis, is widely credited with getting recommendations right, based on what I and other customers have bought.

I see the logic behind their suggestions. Amazon is currently suggesting I buy 17 books. But does it work for scholarly publishers?

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There has been a movement in the STM community to offer relevant metrics at article-level to help users determine the value and quality of research. This data provides additional context to a paper and consequently the BMJ journals have implemented online usage statistics in addition to the recent introduction of links to third-party citation measuring services. more…

Over the past few weeks, a number of new website features have gone live across the BMJ journal platform. Read below for more details on Scopus citation links, email alerts for specific subspecialities and TOC section RSS feeds. more…