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