Elsevier has recently announced the Article of the Future project (I’ve learnt about it via Tony Hirst’s blog post) that aims to “redefine how a scientific article is presented online”. They also released two prototype articles from the field of cell research to illustrate their approach. The original article’s format follows the usual page layout and text organization.
However, the article of the future not just looks different, it also feels different. Look:
The text is broken up into more manageable bits and these are navigated by tabs. The first page features the title, authors and their affiliation (in a pop-up window), abstract as well as bulleted article highlights, author interview (audio or video) and a visualization of the article’s contents. The last three features are to assist the readers in deciding which articles to read and which not and also get more easily to the parts of the article they are interested in most.
Articles of the future will also display figures in ways that will connect them. This will allow readers to have a closer look at the ones they are interested in most and drill down through related supplemental figures.
This all sounds great. I wonder though how this will affect the language of science. How will the interaction between author and reader change? Can’t wait to find out. 
Filed under: Discourse, Linguistics
