Cell Press has recently announced what I considered to be the most interesting advance in journal publishing since articles started being posted online. Basically they have started to harness the power of the web to aggregate the information present in in articles in more useful and efficient ways. For example, there is a Data tab for each article that provides an overview of all figures, and large amounts of information on the selected figure including both it’s caption and the actual context for its citation from the text. Raw data files are also readily accessible from this same screen. References are dynamically expandable to show their context in the text (without refreshing, which is awesome), filterable by year or author, and linked directly to the original publication. You’ll also notice an comments tab where editor moderated comments related to be paper will be posted (showing the kind of integrated commenting system that I expect we will see everywhere eventually).

I have seen a lot of discussion of how the web is going to revolutionize publishing, but to quote one of my favorite movies “Talking ain’t doing.” Cell Press is actually doing.

I’d strongly encourage you to check out their blog post and video and then go play around with one of the articles in the new format. This is really exciting stuff.