Melville, NY, December 1, 2009 – In a move intended to strengthen its position as a leader in the development of innovative technologies for STM publishing, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) today announced the release of a series of new features for its evolving, next-generation hosting platform, Scitation C³. Users will find the functionality of Scitation-hosted journal pages greatly enhanced, enabled by an XML (Extensible Markup Language) infrastructure that can turn granular markup into meaningful content services, reduce discovery time, and dynamically connect similar concepts and expose related content without user interaction.
One of the many new features available on Scitaton C³ is full-text HTML rendering, direct from XML. Through inline reference links and the ability to enlarge tables and figures by clicking on them, the AIP-coined "SuperArticle" virtually lifts off the page in a highly interactive presentation that transforms the traditional scholarly article, helping to speed authoring, reading, and research. "Any company that defines and promotes itself as a provider of leading-edge technology cannot wait for innovations developed by others to fall into its lap," said John Haynes, Vice President, Publishing. "AIP has been decidedly proactive in this arena, examining both what publishers need to offer, and what tech savvy researchers want. The result is a stream of new developments, including our breakthrough iPhone app, iResearch. In today's global marketplace, this ability to deliver technological innovation will give AIP and our Scitation partners a market advantage."
Among the new features are enhanced search functions, with more options and better controls to explore returned content with faceted results. Faceted search helps researchers find information quickly by presenting them with a set of "filters" to narrow down search results. Also new is a real-time institutional mapping interface that reveals institutional connections to research, providing geo-locational context to where the author who performed the research is based.
To facilitate discovery, Scitation has upgraded its Tables of Contents service, bringing more information to the forefront and creating functionality that allows users to work with journal data in new ways. These "Smart ToCs" enable the user to harvest citations, preview abstracts with a mouse-click, and hide content that isn't of interest. In this same vein of facilitating discoverability, a new table browser allows subscribers to view all tables and figures in an article directly from the abstract.
"All these new features follow close on the heels of other enhancements we've made to our Scitation C³ platform in just the past three months, such as a powerful eBooks capability, mobile editions for our journal homepages, and our new iResearch app, which allows users to save PDFs locally to their iPhone or iPod touch," said Paul DeCillis, Director, Online Services. "I'm proud of the body of innovative work we've turned out in a short period of time, and feel it paints an accurate picture of AIP as an organization that is forward looking and can confidently hang its hat on its technological capabilities."