New format of Cell papers - cool!

Today I’ve learned many interesting things. One of them is that Cell has launched this year a new format for the papers they publish, and it looks great! I’ve only had a very quick look at it, but it’s basically much easier to navigate, to inter-relate the different sections, etc.

You can see a video-explanation of how it works here.

And this is how the papers look like:

Some of the new features are:
- There are different tabs for each section (summary, results, etc) and you can move easily from one to the other
- The summary includes a ‘graphical abstract’ and in some cases there’s also a video-interview with the authors
- You can show or hide the affiliations, and when you click on one of them, the names of the authors affiliated to that centre is highlighted, so you don’t have to look at the million tiny symbols you had to do before
- You can see the thumbnails of all the figures, to have an overview, and then click on each of them to see them bigger, with their caption, as usual, but also with links to the places in the paper that refer to that figure!!
- This cross-reference system also works for the references. You can go to each reference and ask where in the paper it is mentioned, and it goes there directly. You can also organise references by author, or year, etc. It also gives you an idea of how these references have been cited in other publications (from Scope)


All in all, a great initiative, I think it will be a real success, and hope others follow suit!