The June Editorial of Nature Chemistry looks beyond the printed page at online services for authors and readers. Now that most people read journal articles that they have downloaded from the web, rather than taken down from a shelf, the article itself — not just its delivery — is on the verge of major changes. Rather than the HTML (full-text online) version of the article being a narrow reflection of the printed page, it can offer enhancements beyond clicking to bring up figures or reference.
Enhancements that further enrich articles are already being offered by other publishers, including the Royal Society of Chemistry with Project Prospect which, among other services, highlights words that are terms in the IUPAC Gold Book and links to their definitions. Apart from the fledgling ChemSpider of the Journal of Chemistry, there are few other publishers exploiting the full potential of their online articles. Although the American Chemical Society are testing several interesting and useful innovations on the JACS website, such as downloadable PowerPoint and ChemDraw files, none of these so far enriches the text of the articles.
NPG’s newest Nature journal, Nature Chemistry, also offers online enhancements. For most numbered chemical compounds in research articles, a separate compound information web page is available (an example can be found here) that can be accessed by clicking on the bold compound number. These compound pages include information such as molecular weight and synonyms, as well as an interactive three-dimensional model of the molecular structure that readers can manipulate. Chemical identifiers, such as InChIs6 and SMILES7 strings, are also included on these pages. These alphanumeric identifiers are machine-readable and can be used in databases and by publishers and chemists to identify and search for chemical compounds. Each numbered chemical compound for any given article is also deposited in the National Institutes of Health PubChem database and a link to the relevant record is included on the compound information page.
Downloadable ChemDraw files for the structures are available for each individual compound, and the compound pages are grouped together on an article-by-article and issue-by-issue basis. A single ChemDraw file containing all of the structures from a particular paper can be downloaded; see here, for example. An example of a compound round-up page for an issue can be found here. As with Supplementary Information, the chemical compound pages are freely available on the journal’s website.
The Editorial describes several other online enhancements in Nature Chemistry, inviting reader feedback at the journal’s blog, The Sceptical Chymist in a post that contains the entire text of the Editorial.