14 DAY TRIAL // A respected publisher in science recently announced that it will introduce a new feature in it upcoming services, that will allow scientists and the general public to explore the structure of proteins and other small molecules in three dimensions right in the science papers it publishes.
Elsevier has been publishing scientific, medical and technical products and services for many years, and now officials at the organization say that the Protein Viewer interactive function will make it easier for readers to understand what detailed scientific papers are all about.
The new feature will first be made available for the SciVerse ScienceDirect for the Journal of Molecular Biology (JMB). This will allow experts and laymen to expand and rotate molecules within the actual article.
Elsevier hopes that this will make its content more convenient and user-friendly, which may in turn translate into an increased volume of circulation for the publication, AlphaGalileo reports.
The features that make SciVerse ScienceDirectWorld possible were derived from both the World Protein Database and Jmol, experts say.
“Protein Viewer will allow all readers to readily visualize and manipulate molecular structures from within the article without the need for specialized stand-alone graphics software,” adds Peter Wright.
“Authors, too, will benefit from having this feature front and center in their articles,” explains Wright, who is the JMB Editor-in-Chief.
The Protein Viewer function also incorporates several options, which allow its users to select the display scheme, size, angle, colors, and surface view of the molecules they see.
“In our effort to improve the ease-of-use of research, it is apparent that the research article and its related research data need to be integrated in a user-friendly way,” says Jsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, the VP Content Innovation at Elsevier.
“Our current SciVerse ScienceDirect platform enables that very well, and after using this functionality in chemistry and earth sciences earlier this year, Protein Viewer is the next step in exploiting this feature for the life sciences community,” he goes on to say.
Protein Viewer will soon be available for other Elsevier journals as well, including BBA Proteins and Proteomics and the Journal of Structural Biology.