eLife has today announced the launch of its redesigned website, providing the best possible article-reading experience for users.
eLife’s mission is to help scientists accelerate discovery by operating a platform for research communication that encourages and recognises the most responsible behaviours in science. The open-access eLife journal was the first step in this initiative. Now, the organisation is bringing best practices from the cutting edge of web technology to science publishing as part of its goal to transform the way important findings are communicated and shared.
“We’re committed to making content in the life and biomedical sciences more accessible and consumable for humans and machines alike,” says Giuliano Maciocci, Head of Product. “We haven’t just improved our website’s aesthetics; we have re-architected the experience of reading online to enhance and accelerate the consumption and use of the latest research.”
eLife has taken a user-driven approach to redesigning every aspect of its new site, resulting in less distracting site ‘furniture’ and a greater focus on the article. Readers have a clearer indication of related content, and will find it easier to discover articles that are relevant to them. “We tested and iterated all the key functional areas of the site with members of the eLife community, to ensure the best possible article-reading experience for everyone,” Maciocci says.
eLife has also designed the site with bandwidth efficiency in mind, making it considerably faster and less data hungry on any connection. Users can continue reading and working wherever they are, and on whatever device they prefer to use. The website will also take advantage of a new technology called ServiceWorker – only recently available in modern web browsers – to allow readers to immediately bring up a page they have visited previously, even with limited or no internet access.
For machines, the site’s new application programming interface (API) provides simpler access to content for machine readability, including text mining, machine learning and online application development. Not only is the content openly available, the patterns that drive the new design and the related design assets are also open-source, to encourage future product development for both eLife and other publishers that wish to use it.
Toby Coppel, Chair of eLife’s Board of Directors and Co-founder and Partner at Mosaic Ventures, who actively invests in innovative new software startups, adds: “There is a lot of cutting-edge user experience and interaction design that can be brought to life science and biomedical publishing, to help scientists find important information more quickly and efficiently. eLife continues to invest behind its mission of accelerating scientific discovery, demonstrating its technical capabilities with this new release and its scientist-led innovation.”
The full front-end user-interface (UI) pattern suite of the eLife website is one component of eLife Continuum – eLife’s open-source platform of services and applications to help publishers do more with everything they publish. Additional components will be announced over the coming months, and significantly expand the organisation’s contributions to open-source software and changing the way research is presented and used.
For further reading about the development of the site, take a look at this blog post by Giuliano Maciocci, eLife's Head of Product.
Media contacts
Emily Packer
eLife
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About
eLife aims to make the communication of results more beneficial for the scientific community as a whole, by operating a platform for presenting research that encourages and recognises the most responsible behaviours in science. While eLife has made its name largely through its consultative approach to peer review and the papers it has published, the organisation seeks to improve all aspects of research communication in support of excellent science – from technology and infrastructure to the ways individuals receive recognition. eLife is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust. Learn more at elifesciences.org.
