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Pimp my RSS

There’s a huge amount of literature out there, and come April, we hope to be bringing some of the best of it directly to you in one neat little package called Nature Chemistry. Until the journal launches, we have to satisfy our cravings by bringing you a weekly dose of Research Highlights. Every week the Nature Chemistry team gets together to discuss our selections. We like to be as current as possible in terms of the work we select and to achieve this we are big fans of the RSS feed – it seems unlikely that anyone reading a blog would be unaware of this technology but for the uninitiated.

I don’t want this post to turn into a rant, so first let me say how much I like the new JACS homepage, especially the interactive pdfs. While the citation links have been available in HTML format for some time, I think I can safely say that a lot of people just like to read the pdf. However, at the same time, the RSS feeds for the ACS journals no longer include the table of contents images. In an ideal world, a title would tell you everything you need to know, but I do like a nice picture to whet the appetite.

Of course the ACS are not the only ones at fault, and I’d like to see the graphical contents in all journal RSS feeds – Angewandte Chemie also do not include images from their RSS feed and neither does Nature (although they don’t have a graphical TOC), but I guess you don’t miss what you never had!

Recently, we at Nature Chemistry were silently grateful to the creator of a pimped Angewandte RSS feed, so why not join me in my campaign – a plea to the ACS to reinstate the images in their RSS feed, or to our friend at the Organic Chemistry blog to work the magic again – either way it will make my week (it’s also possible that this is a relaunch bug…but just in case).

***Update - it does appear to be just a bug***

Steve


Stephen Davey (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

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I fixed the ACS' feed to give out graphics. You can hang out at www.ChemFeeds.com for the intervening time.

You can't expect me not to offer a sneak preview of the RSC's Prospected articles feed, which has the graphical TOC image, identified ontology terms and (admittedly sometimes pretty funky) important compound structures. And with the ontology term ids and InChIs hidden in the metadata. This stuff comes out in the individual journal title feeds as well; anything else people would like to see in RSS feeds?

It's nice to read TOCs.

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