New feature on SciVerse ScienceDirect presents proteins in three dimensions

Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, medical and technical products and services, introduces Protein Viewer, a new, interactive feature on SciVerse ScienceDirect for the Journal of Molecular Biology (JMB) (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00222836). With Protein Viewer, readers of JMB now have the power to expand and rotate molecules within the actual article. SciVerse ScienceDirect merges features of the World Protein Database and Jmol, and embeds them into the article, making its use more convenient and user-friendly.

"Protein Viewer will allow all readers to readily visualize and manipulate molecular structures from within the article, without the need for specialized stand-alone graphics software," said Peter Wright, Editor-in-Chief of JMB. "Authors, too, will benefit from having this feature front and center in their articles."

This interactive feature allows the reader to be more active in the article, by allowing them to go more in-depth and be more focused on their area of specific research. Protein Viewer allows the reader to choose the display scheme, size, angle, colors, surface view, and more. Each individual reader might be looking for a specific portion and presentation of the molecule. Now, this individualization is at the fingertips of the reader.

"In our effort to improve the ease-of-use of research, it is apparent that the research article and its related research data need to be integrated in a user-friendly way," comments IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, VP Content Innovation at Elsevier. "Our current SciVerse ScienceDirect platform enables that very well, and after using this functionality in chemistry and earth sciences earlier this year, Protein Viewer is the next step in exploiting this feature for the life sciences community."

Protein Viewer is one of many innovative features from Elsevier and SciVerse ScienceDirect, all designed to make the readers' experience the most customized, useful, and relevant. Protein Viewer will be available for more Elsevier journals, such as BBA Proteins and Proteomics and the Journal of Structural Biology. More online innovations are planned for both JMB and other Elsevier journals.

Over a quarter of the world's full text scientific, technical and medical (STM) peer-reviewed articles - managed by renowned editors, written by respected authors and read by researchers from around the globe - are available in one place: SciVerse ScienceDirect.