This feature seems to be OK, but I still want the graphics in the HTML document to appear at a readable size. I constantly refer back and forth between the text and the figures when I’m reading. To have to be reading, go click on the picture, look at it, then click back, is too much trouble. If the figure browser were fixed on a portion of the screen, so it could always be open and viewable while you scrolled through the text, that would fix the problem.

Playing around with the figure browser, it seems a little buggy. The paper Jonathan linked to displays the figure captions properly, but in this paper: 10.1021/jo8016814, the captions are nowhere to be found, as far as I can tell, anywhere in the HTML version of the paper. The captions are essential to understanding the figure, because they they contain all the details about reagents. Without them this version of the paper is unreadable. In the paper Jonathan linked to I tried exporting some of the figures to powerpoint, and the images were deformed in the process (all scrunched up horizontally). Overall, looks like a step in the right direction, but still buggy.

They could use a small, tasteful, thin blue box, with a little bit of a margin around it, rather than a thick ugly one that overlaps with the structures at the edge of the figure.

Actually, I’m not really even sure what the point of the hyperlinks around the figures is–when I clicked on one it just brought up another copy of the same figure I was looking at. Kinda pointless. Also, the text mentioning supporting information was just plain old text, not a link to the supporting information. And there was no link from the footnote numbers to the actual footnote. I only checked out one of these pdf w/ links before deciding this format is not for me, so I don’t know if they are all quite so bad (I’ve seen other journals get it right).

One more thing to complain about: The home page for the journals defaults to only showing the first 5 papers, which adds another step to browsing entire issues of a journal. I guess I should just set my bookmark to go directly to the “current issue” page rather than the home page.

“We recognize the importance of the figures we are delivering within the ACS Journal RSS Feeds. ACS is working to improve this service by supplying the medium-sized graphic in the Feeds for those articles that feature a graphical abstract. We appreciate your patience as we work to implement this important change in the coming weeks.

For an example of the size that we will soon be supplying for our ACS Journal RSS Feeds, please click on the abstract graphic within this full text HTML article. This will bring up our new “Figure Browser” feature. Please note that this feature allows users to view an even larger hi-res version of the Figure, lets you scroll through all of the figures and schemes in the paper (instead of clicking on figures one-by-one), and also offers the option to export the figure directly to a Power Point slide.”

Jonathan also let me know that they are setting up a comment form on the Pubs site this morning. Share your thoughts here: http://pubs.acs.org/page/feedback/index.html

The same goes for the HTML versions of the papers. The images are so small that it is impossible to scan the articles, and very difficult to read them. The images are the most meaningful content for most papers, and I don’t want to go through and expand them all myself. The new pdf cover page hypes the HTML version, but the HTML version is useless, so I will still use the pdf, but now I have to go through an extra step of deleting the cover page before I save or print. Really, do they have anyone test their new features before they roll them out?

Does anyone else find it strange, in the “Recommend & Share” section, that there are Digg and Facebook links? In my opinion, more relevant websites for dissemination of scientific information and for social networking are slashdot and linkedin, respectively.