HighWire Press is an ePublishing platform which hosts all of the BMJ Group’s journal content. Located in Palo Alto, California (home of Hewlett-Packard and Facebook) HighWire is a division of the Stanford University Libraries. Twice a year, all participating publishers (including Oxford University Press and Sage Publications) are invited for a two-day conference to learn about the technological developments which are gaining most interest in publishing circles.

A very prominent feature on the Spring agenda was that of mobile technology. There were numerous sessions focusing on the iPhone, Kindle, Sony e-reader and, of course, the iPad (see above). We were told that 18.8% of mobiles are smartphones and that, of particular interest to the BMJ Group, 72% of US physicians now use smartphones. Industry experts even predict that mobile usage will overtake desktop/laptop usage by 2013. As well as advice on developing specialised applications for journal content, participants learned about the option of creating optimised web page interfaces for viewing over mobile devices.

Another area of focus was organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Dom Mitchell (previously BMJ Group) ran through a checklist of factors that affect a website’s ranking in search engine results. We were told to ignore meta tags with keywords, which were previously of great importance but are now universally ignored by the major search engines. We were also warned of the dangers of ignoring the rules (such as putting tags in hidden text in the background of homepages) which poses the risk of becoming un-indexed and losing all referred traffic (!). Changes to focus on include the repetition of a journal’s name, nickname and acronym on the homepage, adding a line of descriptive text which includes relevant keywords and including meaningful ‘alt’ tags for all images. Link building is also an important aspect of SEO and we will be sure to include links back to our journal sites on all our social networking pages (such as Twitter).

There were also a number of sessions focusing on eBooks and the information-seeking behaviour of researchers. HighWire have conducted significant research into this established area of ePublishing. In a survey of 139 librarians, most reported an expectation of significant growth in eBook acquisitions in the next 5 years. Users were found to like simplicity, ease-of-use and perpetual access but many disliked issues related to Digital Rights Management (DRM). Other findings from researcher interviews suggested that all disciplines would like to see article/book recommendations based on their own browsing history and bookmarks (similar to amazon). Also of interest was software which would enable them to add electronic notes and highlighting to articles, and could be easily transferred into other applications such as EndNote.

Other subjects on the agenda included DeepDyve, SciVee, CrossCheck, H20 migration and Inline Video. The conference was a great chance to learn of potential developments and discuss the possible value of implementation with other STM publishers. I look forward to hearing updates from HighWire on the many features discussed over the past two days.

Have you ever found yourself browsing the Internet and thinking that you’re spending too much time regularly visiting the same sites? What if there was a way to visit several sites at the same time? Well there is a way, sort of. Instead of you going to every site, you can have them come to you. How is this possible? This short introduction to RSS feeds will show you how.

RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is a term used for Internet information feeds. These feeds are delivered automatically to the user’s computer through a reader, often called an ‘aggregator’. Readers (such as Google Reader) are free and you may already have an RSS reader as part of your browser. Alternatively you can download a reader to use on your desktop. Once you have your RSS reader set up you simply find websites that offer a feed and subscribe to those you are interested in.

A feed is delivered whenever the site you are subscribed to makes a notification that an update has been made. In other words you can ‘read’ the ‘feed’ after it is sent out. These feeds make it easy to gather information from many different sources and have them automatically sent to one place – your feed reader. Once you have subscribed, the rest is automatic, which means you do not have to go to numerous sites to see if updates have been made.

So, how do we use RSS feeds on the journal sites?

Each of the journal websites contain a number of feeds which are listed on their RSS page. The available feeds include Online First, Current Issue, Recent Issues and Most Frequently Read. All of our Blogs and Podcasts also automatically generate RSS feeds which you can subscribe to by clicking on the RSS icon (see above). In addition to these individual feeds, we have recently updated our OPML file, which contains details of all journal RSS feeds and can be used to bulk import data into your RSS reader.

Perhaps the easiest way to access RSS feeds is via auto-discovery. The auto-discovery functionality will be visible in the form of an orange RSS icon in your address bar (if the website has enabled it).  By clicking on this  image you will be given a full list of the RSS feeds available on that particular site and the ability to subscribe to them (see screenshot above). All of the BMJ journals are fully up-to-date in terms of their auto-discovery functionality.

Tell us what you want!

Finally, please let us know which new RSS feeds would be most useful on the journal sites. Which articles would you like to have the chance to subscribe to? Perhaps you would like to receive updates from certain sections of a table of contents? For example, the Education in Heart section of each new issue of Heart? Please vote by clicking on the following link and leave any additional suggestions in the form of comments below. Many thanks!

Would an RSS feed for e-toc sections be useful?

Have you ever emailed friends or colleagues with a link to a website that you thought they might find interesting? If so, you have participated in social bookmarking. Tagging a website and saving it for later is the fundamental purpose of social bookmarking. However, instead of saving sites to your individual web browser, you are saving them to the Web. It is precisely because your bookmarks are online that you can so easily share them with your colleagues and friends. The video below will show you how to get started on a popular social bookmarking site called delicious:

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

Not only can you save your favourite websites and send them to your friends,  you can also look at what other people have found interesting enough to tag. Most social bookmarking sites allow you to browse through the items based on most popular, recently added, or belonging to a certain category like shopping, technology, politics, blogging, news, sports, etc. You can even search through what people have bookmarked by typing in what you are looking for in the search tool. In fact, social bookmarking sites are often used as intelligent search engines.

So, how do we use social bookmarking on the journal sites?

You may well have noticed that we include links to social bookmarking, news and networking sites on the right-hand side of all our journal articles (see screenshot below). 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: Designed specifically for the needs of scientists and scholars.
• Connotea: Service for scientists, researchers and clinicians.
• Delicious: Popular site for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks.

In addition to allowing our users to bookmark our articles, we use this technology to organise some of our own references. On the Evidence-Based journals (Evidence-Based Medicine, Evidence-Based Mental Health and Evidence-Based Nursing) a Connotea account is used to manage the ‘Long List’ of references that each issue is chosen from. On a weekly basis, the Connotea account is updated with a new list of references, which then automatically produces an RSS feed. This RSS feed is filtered (according to the particular journal) and ends up on a homepage widget in the form of PubMed references (see below). This enables us to keep our homepages looking fresh with minimal editorial input and gives users the opportunity to see which articles are still of high interest despite not making it into the journal.

Twitter is a simple social network.You can think of it as a hybrid of email, instant messaging and SMS messaging all rolled into one neat and simple package. The idea behind Twitter is that you broadcast short messages (also known as “tweets”) to anyone who chooses to follow you. It could be as basic as describing what you’re doing right now or perhaps asking a specific question of your followers. Likewise, you can choose to follow people and recieve their messages. The video below provides a basic explanation of the workings behind the microblogging site.

Given its ability to generate site traffic and communicate instantly with users, Twitter is increasingly being used as a business promotional tool. As such, we have recently created individual Twitter accounts for all of our specialist journals. These work on both automated and manual input methods. We use a third-party site called Twitterfeed to automatically generate “tweets” from Editor’s Choice and Unlocked topic collection RSS feeds. Updates from Podcasts and Blogs are also configured to automatically create a new “tweet” on the relevant journal Twitter page. This very post will also be pushed through to all of our Twitter accounts using the same technology! Although having automated feeds directly from our journals is great and removes the need for editorial input, users appreciate a personal touch so we are encouraging Editor’s to contribute with their own comments as well.

Below is a list of links to all journal Twitter accounts. We will shortly be implementing “Follow us on Twitter” icons onto each of the journal sites but in the meantime please show your support by clicking on the links below and “following” us!

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

Other BMJ Group Twitter accounts that are already going strong include:

• BMJ
• BMJ Evidence Centre
• BMJ Group

Welcome to the first post of the new BMJ Journals Web Development blog. This is the place to stay up-to-date with the goings-on of the journal websites and get to grips with our latest innovations.

The last few weeks have seen the implementation of two new widgets across our specialist journals. You may be wondering what on earth a widget is. Fear not, it’s likely that you’ve already seen widgets, and recognise them, even if you don’t know them by name. Ever seen a quiz or a game on a friend’s Facebook wall? A countdown to an event on a co-workers blog? These are all products of widget technology; simple and useful applications that can be embedded on a webpage, blog or social media profile.

Widgets are used at the bottom of our homepages to display the latest articles from each journal’s Online First, Current Issue and Most Frequently Read RSS feeds. If a journal has its own blog or podcasts, widgets are used to pull updates directly onto that journal’s homepage. They help to keep our sites looking fresh and up-to-date with minimal editorial input.

Most of the specialist websites now contain a doc2doc widget at the bottom of their homepage, which contains the latest discussions from the doc2doc online community and a BMJ Case Reports widget, which displays the latest Case Reports published in the BMJ Case Reports journal. Please feel free to share your thoughts on our use of widgets by leaving comments below.

Next week: Twitter accounts for every journal…