The Content Package

Publishing is as much about the content as it is about the packaging of the content. Many initiatives are underway to re-invent the package and how the user experiences the content on the web.

Google is experimenting with the user interface for news with their Fast Flip project. Users can very rapidly 'Flip' through the online version of news articles much as you would in browsing a newspaper or magazine until you find something of interest. Whether or not this new user experience will become the standard for online news reading isn't as important as the experiment itself as Google tries to push the envelope on the content package.

In an effort to promote innovation in the way information is accessed in the Life Sciences, Elsevier promoted the Elsevier Grand Challenge 2009. Elsevier was looking for specific tools to improve the interpretation of online journals. Specific objectives for the project were to:

• improve the process/methods/results of creating, reviewing and editing scientific content
• interpret, visualize or connect the knowledge more effectively, and/or
• provide tools/ideas for measuring the impact of these improvements

The winner of the challenge is a prototype tool that links the internal content of a journal article with external scientific content. A pilot of the tool can be seen in the November 12th issue of the Cell journal, published by Cell Press. In this issue, mentions of proteins, genes and small molecules are highlighted and links give the user pop-up windows with relevant contextual information. This is accomplished through rich semantic tagging of the content which can be ignored in the xml for print, turned on for presentation in the online version, and turned off by online users that don't want to see the highlighting. An example of the pilot can be seen at:

Dissociation of EphB2 Signaling Pathways Mediating Progenitor Cell Proliferation and Tumor Suppression p679

While innovation in the user interface for news and journal articles is moving ahead with promising prototypes, it seems that similar innovation in eBook interfaces has a ways to go. Most electronic readers attempt to replicate the printed book experience to widely varying success. One experiment that is underway is with the new so called 'Vook' which combines text of a book with video. This format shows promise but examples so far don't demonstrate content that truly shows a close link between the text and the video.