Elsevier are busily touting their ‘article of the future’ – an improved format for online academic papers that includes tabbed browsing, embedded audio and more.

This week they unveiled their first prototypes, based on two Cell papers, which look pretty impressive. One key difference from the conventional academic paper is that you can quickly drill down into any section that you want via tabs at the top of the page.

As well as a graphical abstract, you can also listen to a five-minute interview between a Cell editor and an author on the paper. And of course everything is linked up to the nines.

It certainly looks very attractive, but I do wonder how many people will still just head for the pdf and print it out so they can scribble all over it as they read it on the train / plane / in the bath …