We are delighted to be adding the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care to our collection of over 30 specialist journals. Publishing on behalf of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, we aim to further develop this title, which currently publishes high-quality research and information relevant to clinical care, service delivery, training and education in the field of contraception and reproductive/sexual health.

Dr Anne Szarewski has been Editor in Chief of the Journal since 2003. She is a Clinical Consultant at Cancer Research UK’s Centre for Epidemiology, Mathematics and Statistics and an Honorary Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. In this capacity she manages multi-centre clinical trials of cervical cancer prevention and screening.

The journal has been re-launched with an exciting new look and will be enhanced to provide useful resources and interactive features such as:

• Editor’s choices
• Email alerts
• Top 10 articles
• Online archive

As with our other journals, a Twitter account and Facebook fan page have been created to increase the journal outreach. Please show your support by ‘becoming a fan‘ or ‘following us‘ on Twitter. By doing so, you will receive updates on press coverage, editor’s choices and unlocked articles.

Much of the data we use on a daily basis is not part of the Web. We can see bank statements and photographs online, as well as appointments in a calendar. But can we view our photos in a calendar to ascertain what we were doing when we took them? Or on a map so we know where we took them? Can we see bank statement lines in a calendar to help us put our purchases into context? The answer, currently, is no.

But why not? The simple answer is that we don’t have a web of data. Data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps its data to itself; applications don’t often like to share.

What’s different about the Semantic Web?
The Semantic Web (sometimes referred to as Web 3.0, Web 2.1 or Web 2.0++) is a web of data. The original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. The Semantic Web, however, is about more than that. It concentrates on common formats for integration and the combination of data drawn from diverse sources. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. This allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

Tim Berners-Lee described the Semantic Web vision in the following terms:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analysing all the data on the Web, the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A Semantic Web, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The intelligent agents people have touted for ages will finally materialise. (1999)

Whereas Web 2.0 is focused on people, the Semantic Web is focused on machines. The Web requires a human operator, using computer systems to perform the tasks required to find, search and aggregate its information. It’s impossible for a computer to do these tasks without human guidance because Web pages are specifically designed for human readers. The Semantic Web is a project that aims to change that by presenting Web page data in such a way that it is understood by computers, enabling machines to do the searching, aggregating and combining of the Web’s information — without a human operator. So what are the real benefits offered by this web of data?

Intelligent search results
The major advantage of the Semantic Web is more intelligent searches, either across the web or in large-scale data repositories, where intelligence is referred to in contrast to the conventional keyword-based search methods employed by search engines. For instance, when performing a search in Google for  ‘medical publishing’ you will notice that among the first pages of the results returned, the vast majority contain the keywords ‘medical publishing’ in the respective page text. That is because the search engine does not process the content available semantically and therefore the results, though accurate, will be far from complete.

This is where the semantic web comes in to play. The vision is to get a list of what you asked for even if your keyword does not exist within the web page. In the example above, a page with BMJ Group articles will not be considered relevant if the words ‘medical publishing’ do not exist within our page. In the semantic web world the system would ‘know’ that the BMJ Group publishes medical articles and therefore our articles would be returned to the user performing the query.

Inferring knowledge
Another benefit is the capacity to infer knowledge from existing data. A system built using semantic web technologies, with the support of reasoning procedures could then logically (and independently) deduce information. A classic example is that from the statements ‘all men are mortal’ and ‘Socrates is a man’, we can deduce that ‘Socrates is mortal’. This property (transitive property) in combination with a wider set of properties can augment the knowledge inserted in a system, without requiring human insertion of each and every fact, thereby reducing both error and workload.

By stating 5 facts to a system, using an ontology (a glossary) and a reasoner, the system will be able to deduce 15 facts by applying rules of logic (reasoning). This is precisely what allows the intelligent queries mentioned in the medical publishing example. Such a system, when asked “is Socrates mortal”? will return a YES. Systems without reasoning would produce the answer NO (or UNKNOWN in other cases). Similarly, Socrates would be included in a search like “show me all the mortals in the system”. This is, in fact, what is meant by ‘machine understandable’ information; the ability for a machine to process information independently.

For a good basic introduction to the Semantic Web, take a few minutes to watch the following video. No previous knowledge required!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGg8A2zfWKg

Some 15 years ago, the BMJ was the first general medical journal to launch its own website. At the time, this was a paradigm shift, as Tony Delamothe wrote at the time:

“Users will now be able to scan the list of contents, read the editor’s choice, pick out from the page headed “This week in BMJ” what interests them most, and download the full structured abstracts of these papers. Some articles will be available in full text (for example, in this week’s journal all the articles on electronic developments). As more of the “hard” copy of the journal is produced electronically we hope to increase this proportion. Past issues of the journal will be available from an electronic archive, as will our advice to authors on the conduct and presentation of research. Details of other journals and books published by the BMJ Publishing Group (with ordering facilities) will also be provided.”

The next milestone in 1998 arrived in the shape of full-text articles online. As Richard Smith and Tony Delamothe wrote:

“We are restricting most of the BMJ’s homepage to text because images, sound, and video take a long time to download with currently available software. But there are tantalising possibilities for the future—for example, our recent fortnightly reviews on Parkinson’s disease could have included video clips of parkinsonian gait and tremor. The linkage functions of the web mean that access to a paper could provide simultaneous access to any correspondence and editorial comment it provoked. Linkages could provide the full text of references to papers, and the full text of references to references (and so on), so that readers need no longer take authors’ interpretations of earlier work on trust. Authors’ original data could also be made available through an electronic archive linked to the paper.”

However daring this seemed, both editors were still quietly cautious in their predictions for the future: “Predicting the future of electronic publishing is as risky as any other branch of futurology … future electronic developments will be closely informed by what our readers tell us they want and need.”

Much has happened to bmj.com in the intervening years. We introduced publishing ahead of print, continuous publication, and processing our articles via our webhost HighWire’s content processing platform, HighWire Express. Many features and technical innovations have been added to the site—such as folders, web extras, blogs, podcasts, videos, to name a few—all of which reflected new technical developments and the desire to provide users of bmj.com with the varied outputs they were expecting, and all of which contributed to making bmj.com the huge and varied beast it is today (For more information on the history of bmj.com, follow this link: http://resources.bmj.com/bmj/about-bmj/copy_of_history-of-bmj.com). But, to misquote a popular film release, technology never sleeps.

On 25 August 2010, between  5.30 pm and 6.30 pm GMT, a long anticipated moment had come: after months of preparation, bmj.com in its entirety had been migrated to a brand new web platform, affectionately known as H20. In the words of our webhosts, Stanford University’s HighWire Press, H20 is “an infrastructure that is flexible, permeable, and standards compliant throughout. Its architecture integrates with Web 2.0 and other emerging technologies and services and offers optimal speed and 24x7x365 systems monitoring and response … It can easily be built upon using Web 2.0 applications, feeds, widgets, and web services.”

H20 enables customisation of design and add-ons depending on publishers’ individual requirements, and in our up and coming redesign we shall explore those capabilities fully. In the meantime,  bmj.com already looks cleaner and more contemporary after the migration and offers some standard features that come with the platform and keep users in context at all times, including, but not limited to easier ways to enlarge figures and thumbnails, expandable/collapsible author affiliations, related links, and other article enhancements, and the ability to view multimedia or video within the article.

For the BMJ editors and the H20 team, the August launch had been preceded by many months of comparing articles, with the new format appearing on a beta site. Many log sheets were completed through to iron out mistakes and glitches, and this work continued at full speed for several weeks after migration, to ensure that what users found was no different to what they were expecting. And although the migration process itself did not seem to take long, that evening the H20 team worked until midnight to ensure that everything was as it should be, logging problems as they presented themselves. Whether this was the way graphics were displayed or font sizes rendered, or whether it was missing titles with rapid responses—everything required meticulous checking and rectification. One of the problems with our articles was that, owing to the site’s evolution over the years (see above), they were all in different formats of HTML and XML, so a lot of conversion work by external suppliers was necessary, which, in turn, required thorough checking and probably threw up things that had happily lain dormant for many years. The journal archive, which dates back to 1840,  exists as as pdfs and did not need to be converted. However, the quality checking continues—in-house and with the help of our users and authors,

The impact of the new web platform and its potential will become obvious over the coming years and the new features offered will become even more relevant as we are preparing for a redesign on the site. All in all, it was amazing to see how something so technically complex went through with comparatively minor mistakes.

Birte Twisselmann, web editor, bmj.com

We’re pleased to announce that individual Facebook fan pages are now live for all our specialist journals. Click on the links below and become a fan of your favourite journal! Please scroll down the page for more information on the functionality and value that these pages offer.

• Acupuncture in Medicine
• Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases
• Archives of Disease in Childhood
• BMJ Case Reports
• British Journal of Ophthalmology
• British Journal of Sports Medicine
• Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin
• Emergency Medicine Journal
• Evidence-Based Medicine
• Evidence-Based Mental Health
• Evidence-Based Nursing
• Frontline Gastroenterology
• Gut
• Heart
• Injury Prevention
• JAMIA
• Journal of Clinical Pathology
• JECH
• Journal of Medical Ethics
• Journal of Medical Genetics
• Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery
• JNNP
• Medical Humanities
• Occupational & Environmental Medicine
• Postgraduate Medical Journal
• Sexually Transmitted Infections
• Thorax
• Tobacco Control

What are Facebook fan pages?

Social news websites are communities that encourage their users to submit news stories, articles and media (images/videos) and share them with other users or the general public. Depending on various factors, such as the number of user votes for each item, some of these articles will be given more prominence on the website.

Social news sites generally function via a wisdom of the crowds principle; groups of individuals with different points of views are able to collectively determine the value or importance of content disseminated through the community. The users are offered the editorial power to influence the visibility of content.

Different types of social news websites

Social news websites can be separated into wide-focus or narrow-focus communities. Some of them only cater to a niche audience and others cover just about every possible topic in a bid to appeal to a mass audience.

Digg is the most popular example of a social news website and it’s probably the most well known as well. It initially started as a community with a strong technological focus, before expanding its topics to include politics, science and other types of news. Other popular social news websites which cover a wide range of topics include Reddit and Mixx. Examples of social news websites with a more narrow focus include Showhype (entertainment) and Sphinn (Internet marketing/SEO).

How do social news websites work?

For all social news sites, content submitted by users is filtered by an internal algorithm that automatically determines the popularity of each story. This algorithm may involve various other factors apart from absolute votes: the discussion surrounding the story and the relationship between users (friends or not) may also be taken into account.

All our journal articles contain Digg and Reddit icons in the right-hand column (see screenshot below). If you find a particular article of interest, simply click on one of these icons and you’ll be taken to the social news website where you will be asked for a brief description of the item you’re linking to. Remember, the key to a successful submission is interesting content and a descriptive title.

Our blogs also contain Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon links (see just below under ‘Share this post’). So if you find this post of any use, do have a go at recommending it to others!

The world has never been so connected as it is today. The internet has reduced the usual ‘six degrees of separation’ to just one or two. Colleagues can interact with friends and family, old friends get introduced to new friends, and family members can keep in touch with all of your associates. Nowhere does this kind of social activity occur more than on Facebook. After all, Facebook is not just for keeping tabs on friends and filling out quizzes – it can also be used as an effective business tool.

Facebook and networking

Facebook is what you make of it. It can be a serious professional tool, a place for fun and entertainment, or a combination of both. Ultimately, you have control over what you add to your profile and with whom you share it. As more and more ‘adult-users’ join Facebook, the possibility for connecting to others with similar professional interests increases.

Many professional and academic organisations have a presence on Facebook and the roles they play on the social networking platform are as varied as their types.  While some serve to organise individuals from a large geographic area (alumni groups), others are location specific (Association of Women Journalists in Chicago) or event specific (charity walks).

According to Facebook, 85% of college students use Facebook. Following the saying ‘meet them where they are’, database developers and other educators are creating academic and scholarly applications for Facebook. For example, PubMed Search allows users to search PubMed within Facebook, share articles with friends and save them to their account for future reference.

Is this really a suitable and sustainable source of business opportunities?

Social networks can be a great way to extend branding and create a community around an organisation.  Facebook groups and pages provide an identifiable canvas for users. They can be marketed with ease, and they can create a ‘human’ touch to a product. Taking a laid back or personal approach to a Facebook business profile could help generate unsolicited interest.

However, there are inherent dangers with taking a more relaxed approach to marketing. Organisations should always remember not to mix personal and professional views and to restrict the amount of data which is shared with external applications.

For those of you who are new to social networking and would like some background information, the video below provides a useful introduction:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_KF7TYKVc

You may have noticed over the past few days that Twitter has been looking slightly different. That’s because the microblogging site has finally finished rolling out the new version of its web interface (a.k.a. the “New Twitter”) to all 160 million of its users in six different languages. For those of you averse to change, the option to view the old version of Twitter is still available (see screenshot below) but this will eventually disappear and all users will automatically be redirected to the new and improved Twitter.com. So, it’s time to familarise yourself with the new design.

The New Twitter brings many innovative features to Twitter’s web interface. Most notably, it provides support for multimedia viewing directly on Twitter.com, which prevents users from having to click off-site to view images and video. Media content partners now include YouTube, Vimeo, Ustream, TwitPic, Flickr and 11 other firms. Multimedia content now appears in a sidebar beside a relatively traditional newsfeed.

The new interface also displays a slew of improved navigation controls, concentrated in a drop-down menu bar that runs across the top of the screen. Another big feature is the ability to view threaded conversations more easily on the Messages page. Other changes include:

• The screen is split into two panes, left is the tweet stream, the right is helpful information (video, photos, etc.)
• Click on a video link and it will play within the right pane
• If somebody posts with geolocation enabled, a map will show in the right pane
• Helpful profile information on Twitter users [e.g. profile picture] is displayed

So, how do I use the new Twitter?

This video will help you get to grips with the key differences between the old site and the new design:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NshQFrpC2O4

The journal websites have recently installed library branding functionality, which is similar to that offered by NEJM and Oxford University Press. Library branding basically means that users gaining access to a particular journal via a site licence will see a logo of the library that is paying to give them access near the top of the third column on the right hand side of the page (see screenshot below).

Librarians can now upload their institution’s logo and name onto the HighWire system, which will be displayed to members of their community accessing content through their IP addresses. It can be found at the top right of all our journal pages.

We support a logo size of 110-150px by 40-60px in .jpg, .gif, or .png format. The maximum file size that can be uploaded is 15KB. Each institution has an administrator who can login to a designated area of each journal website through the ‘Sign in’ link.
The HighWire system recognises these administrators automatically and provides the necessary features to upload an image and change  institution name.  Please see below various screenshots from this administrative area of the HighWire sites:

The administrator username and password are sent to customers as soon as they subscribe to any of our journals. If for seem reason a customer does not receive these details, they can contact Customer Services at the following email address:

support@bmjgroup.com

by Anna Sayburn, Senior editor, Best Health, asayburn@bmjgroup.com

How many people know that the BMJ Group’s Evidence Centre produces a high quality, evidence-based health information service, aimed at consumers? Probably not enough, which is one reason we want to make a noise about the newly launched Best Health website. Best Health grew out of the clinical products produced in the Evidence Centre. Originally the website was designed as a ‘translation’ of the Clinical Evidence site, intended for patients to use with their doctors.

The design process

Over recent years, we’ve added a weekly news service, produced podcasts and videos, and written printable summary leaflets for all our in-depth conditions. This new material was sent to our corporate clients for use on their own websites (you may have seen news stories on The Guardian or Boots websites). Until now, we’ve been unable to showcase them on our own site. However, we wanted to do more than add new material. We were aware that the home page had become quite wordy, and the design needed freshening up. We’d also had feedback that some readers found navigation difficult and the structure didn’t always seem logical.

Finally, we’ve spent the last year re-engineering our XML, making it more flexible for customers and allowing us to pull out and highlight different sections of our content as we wished. This meant we needed to rebuild the website anyway, so we took the opportunity to make all the changes we’d long wanted to make. It was the first time I’d worked on a website re-design, and the brief from the technical team was to start from scratch. We began by pulling together all the feedback we’d had from readers about the site design, and the user experience. I reviewed it to find common themes. One surprisingly simple point was that some readers found our basic font too small, and wanted an obvious way of adjusting text size. Others had found themselves in cul-de-sacs, on pages without sufficient navigation to get back to where they’d started from.

We handed all this over to the designers, and I came up with some proposals for wire frames, based on a number of use cases. We then had the job of translating the use cases into user stories for the requirements document, so that the technical team could begin work. We met weekly, thrashing out problems as they arose. Elin Svensson managed the project, ably liaising between the technical team (led by Keith Marshall) and the editors. It was exciting to see the first designs for the site – clean, crisp and with plenty of white space.

The results

Some subtle changes made a great difference to the site. Our ‘further information’ pages, formerly treated as generic sidebars leading off standard pages, can now be grouped together and highlighted in the navigation, allowing us to surface some useful content that had been buried on the previous site. We’ve applied the new group search, which is a massive improvement on our previous search functionality. And not only can we display our news stories; we can now link them to our in-depth information on specific topics, and if you look at a specific condition, you can see the relevant news stories attached. Small changes, but they help the site look up to date and relevant.

I’m particularly pleased that we have a good platform to show our health information videos, which range from how to deal with head lice, to what you can expect after a diagnosis of testicular cancer. We hope that they’ll attract more interest, enabling us to get funding to produce more videos. The site is partially behind a pay wall, for our institutional and individual subscribers. It’s freely available within BMA House, and if BMJ staff would like out of office access, they can contact me for a password.

We hope the site will provide an enhanced experience for existing and future subscribers, and also act as a showcase to demonstrate the breadth and quality of the consumer services we provide at BMJ Group. Do take a look at http://besthealth.bmj.com and let us know what you think.

This is the second post which aims to explain the variety of web services we offer to users at article-level. A few weeks ago we covered email alerts, My Folder, citation manager and permissions. This week we’ll be looking at our links to responses, PubMed, related content and Google Scholar.

Responses
On all articles, it is possible to submit an electronic letter simply by clicking ‘Submit a response’. You will then need to enter your name, email address, occupation and affiliation. You will also be prompted to declare any competing interests. Once submitted, the Editor of the journal will review your letter and either accept or reject it for online publication within 7 days. If accepted, a link to your response will appear within the parent article’s content box (see screenshot to the left). Should your response be of particular merit, the Editor may invite you to publish your response in print.

Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across a variety of publishing formats and disciplines. Each of our articles is linked to the database before being published online and offers users the oppportunity to view more works by each of the article’s authors.

Related Content
HighWire uses Semio technology to tag and group articles by topic and subtopic, enabling users to browse to content and find articles they may not have using a standard search. We also have special collections, such as Editor’s Choice and Unlocked, which amass all articles of the same ‘type’ into one location for each journal.

PubMed
PubMed is a free database accessing the MEDLINE database of citations, abstracts and some full text articles on life sciences and biomedical topics. All of our articles are linked to PubMed before publication and therefore contain direct links to individual citations. We also provide links to a list of articles written by each of the contributing authors.

Social Bookmarking
As discussed in a previous post, we include links to social bookmarking, news and networking sites on the right-hand side of all our journal articles. By clicking on one of the social bookmarking icons, you can easily tag a particular article and bookmark it for reading/sharing later. The sites that we link to include:

• CiteULike
• Complore
• Connotea
• Delicious
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• Technorati
• Twitter