Project tries out new technology on journal articles

TBI and Talis have picked the European Respiratory Society and the American Thoracic Society for a pilot project to test the application of semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies to journal articles. The project is particularly designed to explore the potential of these tools to help society publishers increase reader and member engagement with the society and its publications.

'Together, the European Respiratory Society and the American Thoracic Society publish a significant proportion of high-quality articles in the field of respiratory medicine,' said Melinda Kenneway, director of TBI. 'This - together with the quality and highly structured nature of their content - makes them ideal candidates for this project. Members of both societies will for the first time be able to access journal articles through a single integrated interface - but one that can be branded in different ways, as appropriate for each individual society. They will also be able to use a range of services designed to help them discover people and content of interest in more sophisticated ways than search queries alone can support.'

'We hope that this experiment will help us better understand what the next generation of online journals might look like,' said Elin Reeves, assistant publications manager at the European Respiratory Society.

The pilot project will begin in early 2009 and it is anticipated the results will be published and made freely available in the summer.