Michael Aufreiter, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Substance, an open platform for digital publishing, introduces an updated eLife Lens.
The importance of open access has been widely recognised. Now scholars need the means to transition their journals to open access and improve their publishing workflows. In this post I’d like to introduce you to eLife Lens, a minimalist open source publishing software that allows self-hosting of a scientific journal.
A web format that scientists choose over PDF
In June 2013 eLife launched the original Lens Reader, which provides a novel way of looking at content on the web. It’s being recognised widely, as adoption increases and development continues.
Lens Reader is being piloted in journals from six publishers on the HighWire platform. In collaboration with AMS and MathJax it is currently being optimised for display of mathematical content.
A hub for accessing Lens articles
Last week eLife released another piece of software, which complements the Lens ecosystem. Lens Browser is a simple to use interface for discovering research.
Lens Browser provides an instant preview of relevant paragraphs to help the user deciding wether a matched article is relevant or not. Additionally, filters can be applied, to narrow down the result. There is also a quick way to look at how many results there are for a given search term under each filter.
A complete solution for hosting an open journal
With the deployment of Lens Browser, eLife runs an open source version of their journal. Lens Articles are pure static web pages that can be hosted on any web server. Lens Browser utilises the structured Substance Article format to generate a search index using ElasticSearch, a technology for realising full text search.
Using this simple setup allows publishers to self-host their journal, without depending on proprietary services and formats. Lens Reader is easy to extend and customise. Please see the official documentation to learn how.
Here is checklist of what is needed to host a journal:
- A set of JATS-compatible XML files (your article corpus)
- A static web-server for hosting Lens Articles (eLife uses Amazon S3)
- An EleasticSearch cluster front-faced with a Node.js instance (eLife uses qbox.io and Heroku.com)
- Custom workflows to automatise the process (a bunch of Python scripts is used at eLife)
Conclusion
While Lens Reader is ready for production, our newly introduced browsing interface must be considered experimental. However, we hope that we continue to receive support from scientists and publishers to help building the publishing system of the future.
