Publisher and research workflow solutions provider John Wiley & Sons has implemented Labtiva’s ReadCube Web Reader for the Wiley Online Library. PDFs read with ReadCube now allow users to access “hyperlinked in-line citations, annotations, clickable author names, and direct access to supplemental content, making it easier for researchers to discover, access and interact with scientific literature,” the company explained in a release.
Users can also save articles and annotations to the free ReadCube Desktop reference manager, available for PCs and Macs. Additional features include tools geared toward helping researchers organize academic literature, find content using a new recommendation system based on their reading habits, and acquire articles using fewer proxies and logins.
“We’re making it easier for scientists to critically analyze their research and accelerate the dissemination of scientific knowledge,” Robert McGrath, co-founder and CEO of Labtiva, said in the announcement. “One of our goals is to create a multi-publisher ecosystem with millions of interconnected articles to help publishers maintain engagement with their readers.”
At launch last week, the ReadCube features were available for 109 journals in the Wiley Online Library. The company will gradually roll out these features to the Online Library’s entire collection during the first half of 2013.
About Matt Enis
It seems that enabling patrons to access articles immediately, through models like this, comes at a cost that libraries are being asked to pay, but cannot control. While libraries can indicate what journals we already have access to, we can often also get other articles quickly enough for people’s needs, and for no cost, through interlibrary loan requests. So, it would be great if this sort of service could be better integrated with existing library services, so that we could use it as a supplement, while still also taking advantage of other libraries’ collections, as well. Libraries would be happy to pay reasonable per article fees, but the financial uncertainty in this model, giving people unmediated/unlimited access, seems unsustainable. (Not to mention DRM limitations, third party access to patron information, and library collecting/preservation/buying vs licensing mission issues. Open access publishing efforts may address many of these issues, but for now publishers and librarians both need to work more closely together to satisfy people’s information needs, and the library mission of both access and preservation.)