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Enabling multimedia in journal articles
David Evans
New technologies, particularly Web-based ones, are changing the way we communicate and conduct business. This development applies to the academic community as much as to other sectors. However, academic publishing has been slower to embrace such technologies mainly because of the nature of the peer-review process and the format of academic papers, both of which follow relatively fixed guidelines.
Some ScienceDirect journal articles already feature video files.
New initiatives that increase the functionality and usefulness of journal articles are starting to accelerate the adoption of new technologies by the scientific publishing community. One area getting attention is enhanced media, which Elsevier is focusing on through its Enhanced Media Team. The EMT is a cross-departmental and cross-domain group, bringing together these eleven colleagues all possessing specialized areas of knowledge: eight publishing representatives from different subject areas and three ScienceDirect team members. Set up in the spring of 2008, the EMT pools expertise and formulates concrete ideas for including and developing multimedia content in journal articles.
Ideas in development
Some of the team’s ideas are already in use or being actively developed. Elsevier is continuously developing the functionality of our digital library. The platform, ScienceDirect, contains about 25% of the world's science, technology and medicine fulltext and bibliographic information, including over 2,500 journal titles. We’re now looking at how best to include many of the available diverse media tools, where appropriate, in published articles.
Approaches under consideration include:
- Enhancing articles already on ScienceDirect, for example, by adding links to further information
- Redefining the traditional printed article to make it more suitable for online use, for example, by inserting video files or multimedia graphics
- Adding to articles supplementary tools and services allowing readers to utilize the article content more fully.
Video abstracts on ScienceDirect
As you may know, some ScienceDirect journal articles already feature video files. Unfortunately, it’s not yet possible easily to search ScienceDirect for these videos, because their details are often hidden in article appendices directing readers to supplementary material including the videos themselves.
“If one looks at the rise of various Web 2.0 technologies and the number of articles we receive with multimedia files in them, it’s obvious that the next generation of scientists will incorporate these types of content into their work and research habits.”
According to ScienceDirect Product Manager Judson Dunham, “This is one of the developments we’re working on at the moment. Our first goal is to develop, to appear at the top of each article, a separate box showing all the supplementary materials available with that article. After that, we’ll focus on making the videos more findable and searchable.”
The growing popularity of video use in academic articles is exemplified by the Journal of Number Theory. Under the initiative of the journal’s Editor-in-Chief David Goss and Publishing Editor Tyge Burgess, a member of the EMT, authors have started to add video abstracts to their articles on ScienceDirect. These videos can be viewed by clicking directly from the articles on ScienceDirect through to YouTube. One can also access the articles on ScienceDirect via a link from the YouTube portal.
“The overarching idea behind this, and the other online tool enhancements we are currently working on, is to provide tools and resources for our authors to develop, present and distribute their content in innovative ways and for our readers to be able to get the most out of articles,” commented Burgess. “If one looks at the rise of various Web 2.0 technologies and indeed the explosion in the number of articles we receive with multimedia files in them, it’s obvious that the next generation of scientists will incorporate these types of content into their work and research habits.”
Multiple benefits for users
The benefits of articles optimized for a multimedia, Web-based environment are manifold. In the near future, users will have access to much more information than can be contained in a traditional article and will be able easily to visualize and delve into the information supporting an article. For example, being able to see an author conduct an experiment could add immediacy and credibility to the results the author describes in her or his paper. Also, graphics in printed journals are static items, but in the future some of them may become interactive — allowing users to change variables to see what results one would get if different data were inserted.
Some enhancements envisaged for
ScienceDirect are still in the early
developmental phase, and the
evolution of the platform is an ongoing
process. That said, the journal article
enhancements already in place on
ScienceDirect are proving to be
successful and are helping improve the
submission, publication and interactive
experiences of authors and readers. 
da.evans@elsevier.com
www.sciencedirect.com
www.elsevier.com/locate/yjnth
www.youtube.com/JournalNumberTheory
