BioMed Central’s article web pages have been redesigned with a cleaner, easy-to-navigate new look which adds significant new functionality (example article).
Summary of improvements:
Improved support for MathML
MathML for mathematical formulae is now available to users of all browsers, not just Internet Explorer. More details…
Access to archival copies of linked web pages, via WebCite
links provide access to archival copies of all web pages linked from articles, even if the web page concerned is no longer available. More details…
Download link for original figure files
Figures in BioMed Central articles are made available as both medium and high resolution JPEG versions, but is can sometimes be even more useful to have access to the original version of the figure supplied by the author. This is especially true for editable vector figure formats such as EPS, PDF, PPT and DOC. Figure popups now include a download option for the original figure file for any article that was submitted online. You can use this feature to re-use and adapt figures for use in presentations or teaching material. Just remember to correctly attribute the source, as required by our open access license.
Posting of articles to social networking sites
You can now easily post articles to sites including Cite-U-Like, Connotea and Facebook, using links conveniently placed at the foot of the new navigation box.
Better integration with Google Scholar
Extra links in the navigation box mean that you can now search for other articles by authors on Google Scholar just as easily as searching on PubMed. Similarly, a link to "related articles on Google Scholar" has been added, in addition to the existing link to "related articles on PubMed".
Downloadable article XML
For those looking to reuse BioMed Central content (as permitted by our open access license), each article includes a link to the downloadable XML of the article. More information about making use of BioMed Central’s article XML is available from our text mining information page
More compact and efficient HTML
Better designed HTML has allowed us to make our articles 25% more compact – so they download more quickly and use less bandwidth – great if you are accessing from a mobile device.
We have plenty of further improvements in the pipeline, so watch this space. If you have any comments or suggestions regarding our new design, we’d like to hear from you. Please get in touch.
I appreciate your help by providing us the articles in the full text which are not accessible to all, and that I really need in my research.
Maureen Knapp, who is part of the the Medical Library Association’s Task Force on Social Networking Software, has posted an interesting comparison of the respective roles of the different social networking sites that you can post BioMed Central articles to, from a scientific perspective.