From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2013 06:45:54 +0000

Potentially of interest to this list.

The American Society of Plant Biologists adopts Utopia Documents,
software designed by scientists for scientists, to enrich PDF versions
of articles in its journals. Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell are
the first plant science journals to apply this novel technology to
improve scholarship.

As part of its efforts to make articles published in its journals ever
more useful to researchers, the American Society of Plant Biologists
(ASPB) will, from January 8, 2013, enrich Plant Physiology and The
Plant Cell articles with Utopia Documents. All PDF versions of new
articles published from the start of 2013 — along with many more
published over the preceding years — will incorporate the advanced
features that are accessible to the user via the free Utopia Documents
PDF viewer.

ROCKVILLE, MD, USA, and MANCHESTER, UK, January 8, 2013 – Imagine how
useful a PDF would be in which it is possible to link in-text
references directly to the articles referenced, to export tables into
a spreadsheet, and to highlight a term and get a wealth of related
links. Imagine how much such a document would improve research and
scholarship. Reflecting ASPB’s commitment to experimentation and
innovation in research communication, this possibility is now a
reality for ASPB’s journals, Plant Physiology and The Plant Cell.

ASPB aims for its journals not only to be avenues for the exchange and
communication of knowledge, but, wherever possible, to also be
catalysts for innovation. In that light, the Society will enhance and
enrich the PDF versions of articles in its journals with the
state-of-the-art techniques used by Utopia Document’s PDF viewer to
bring features to those PDFs that before now could be realized only in
web versions of the article. The technology behind the Utopia
Documents tool allows users to view interactive and extractable tables
that can be rendered as graphs; active links to citations in the
paper; and link-outs, directly from the PDF, to numerous relevant
information resources without the need to retype or even copy and
paste any keywords or phrases. The result is that the PDFs are as
interactive as the HTML versions of the articles, if not more so.

Full press release: http://bit.ly/13dG26D

Jan Velterop