eLife Lens

eLife Lens improves the reading and use of scientific articles by making it possible to explore figures, figure descriptions, references and more without losing your place in the article text.  

eLife Lens is an innovative tool for reading and navigating research online. While most online research articles tend to replicate print, eLife Lens takes greater advantage of the internet’s flexibility; readers can absorb key elements in an important paper more readily, more quickly, and more effectively. 

This new viewer is about to be trialled by SpringerLink for its open access content, and it has been piloted by multiple publishers since its introduction by eLife in 2013. These publishers include the American Physiological Society (APS) and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), as well as the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), American Society for Microbiology (ASM), American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), and European Respiratory Society (ERS), all of which use the HighWire Open Platform to host their content. 

According to Professor Salim Abdool Karim, Director at CAPRISA in South Africa, 'eLife Lens adds so much more to the reading experience than simply being a PDF of a paper journal page. When I read articles in other journals electronically, I get irritated at not being able to see the diagrams simultaneously – your solution to this problem is great.'

The eLife Lens Reader is easy to extend and customise. Please see the official documentation to learn how at https://github.com/elifesciences/lens. The application is available to use under the opensource Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license.