From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:53:12 +0100

Of likely interest to librarians, repository managers, and publishers
on this list.

The new version of the free Utopia Documents scientific PDF-viewer has
been released. It is freely downloadable from http://utopiadocs.com
and currently available for Mac and Windows with a Linux version
coming shortly.

The Utopia Documents PDF-viewer bridges the 'linkability gap' between
HTML and PDF, and makes the latter just as easily linked-in to the Web
as the former (as long as you are online, of course). Utopia Documents
allows you, if you so wish, to experience dynamically enriched
scientific articles. From whichever publisher, since Utopia Documents
is completely publisher-independent, providing enrichment for any
modern PDF*, even 'informal' ones in made by authors of their
manuscript (e.g. via 'Save as PDF' in their wordprocessing software)
and deposited in institutional or other open repositories. (*Older,
bitmap-only PDFs – essentially just image scans – are certainly
readable with Utopia Documents, but link-outs to the Web are mostly
not possible.)

'Enrichment' means easy link-outs, directly from highlighted text in
the PDF, to an ever-expanding variety of data sources and scientific
information and search tools. It means the possibility to export any
tables into a spreadsheet format, and a 'toggle' that converts
numerical tables into easy-to-read scatter plots. It means Altmetrics,
whenever available, that let you see how articles are doing. It means
a comments function that lets you carry out relevant discussions that
stay right with the paper, rather than having to go off onto a blog
somewhere. It means being able to quickly flick through the images and
illustrations in an article.

With Utopia Documents, publishers, repositories, and libraries can
offer enriched scientific articles just by encouraging the scientists
and students they serve to use the free Utopia Documents PDF-viewer,
and so make more of the scientific literature at hand. Utopia
Documents is truly free, and not even registration is needed. (Only
those who want to use the comment function need to register, because
for reasons of maintaining the integrity of scientific discourse,
Utopia Documents does not allow anonymous comments.)

Some journals, such as the Biochemical Journal published by Portland
Press, and the Royal Society of Chemistry, provide extra tags in their
PDFs that enable Utopia Documents to extend its functionality even
further, for instance by rendering pictures of protein structures into
dynamic, rotatable, manipulable 3D formats. Discussions are underway
with other publishers to do the same.

Utopia Documents is usable in all scientific disciplines, but its
link-out resources are currently especially optimised for the
biomedical/biochemical spectrum.

Utopia Documents is free. Feedback is highly appreciated.

Jan Velterop