Publisher Reports on New Technologies

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HighWire Press Launches Web 2.0 Technologies

HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, is a not-for-profit electronic journal developing and hosting service. Long known as an innovator in scholarly publishing, HighWire Press now hosts journals with web 2.0 features. This report may inspire ideas about web 2.0 features for your publications or institution.

One "flavor" of web 2.0 is community-generated content, and in the scholarly world, Letters to the Editor, or eletters, are a great example. BMJ Rapid Responses are a great example of eletters, since BMJ readers are also prolific writers!

Certainly, any list of the most read, most cited, and most emailed articles is an example of web 2.0. Since those lists are created by monitoring user behavior, they are forms of user generated content. See the "Most Popular" section of the New England Journal of Medicine for lists of the journal's contents that are most viewed, most emailed, most cited, most blogged, most searched, and most widely covered in the press.

Citation Maps have been around so long that they may even seem anachronistic. Authors use citations to identify what is important to them, and the scholarly community expresses what is important to it through citation analysis. The Citation Map gathers all the eligible articles around the target article (both citing and cited-by) and then displays the top most-cited articles in that set. For example, check out the Citation Map of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

People seem to think of RSS feeds and podcasting as web 2.0 technologies. Although they are not "user generated content," RSS feeds and podcasting allow a content provider or publisher to push content to where the users are. RSS feeds can be generated at a number of different levels. Radiology, for example, has feeds for its Ahead of Print content, for regular issue production, and for each section in the journal's TOC. Visit http://radiology.rsnajnls.org/rss/

Each week, Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, the Editor of JAMA, records her thoughts about the current issue and makes those thoughts available to the large JAMA readership. Podcasting (and "vodcasting," or video podcasting) allows a scholarly publisher to put its content in a form other than the written word for consumption on the web or even off-line on mobile media devices. For information about the JAMA podcast, visit http://jama.ama-assn.org/misc/audiocommentary.dtl

Health Affairs has had remarkable success with its blog. Entries are both invited commentaries from the health care policy community and editorials from Project Hope staff, the publisher of Health Affairs, and of course readers can post their comments too. The blog helps push traffic to Health Affair's regular content, and vice versa, with links on article pages pointing to the blog.

Social bookmarking services such as CiteULike and del.icio.us allow users to store their favorite URLs. Users save and categorize personal collections of bookmarks and share them with others. Genes & Development has made it easy to use some popular social bookmarking services by putting the links to those services on the article pages. See bottom of the right side content box, or scroll down to the bottom of the page.

It's a bit difficult to illustrate, but HighWire uses AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to pull data from other sources such as PubMed, CrossRef, ISI, and Scopus and to display those data in the context of specific articles. For example, when a reader sees the number of ISI citations available for a specific article, that ISI count is pulled in via AJAX.

In addition to these web 2.0 technologies, HighWire is in the midst of a substantial platform upgrade called HighWire 2.0 ("H20") which is a native XML services-based platform that will allow even more robust web 2.0 functionalities and content services.

If you have questions about web 2.0 and HighWire Press, please contact Mark Johnson.