Society for General Microbiology launches new publishing platform

25 June 2015

Today, the Society for General Microbiology launches its new publishing platform, which brings together all of the scholarly content published by the Society’s six peer-reviewed journals. The new platform has been carefully designed with all of our users in mind, from authors and editors through to readers and librarians.

The new platform features a completely responsive design, providing readers with a fast, personalised experience that they can read on whichever device they use. Users can register to be alerted whenever content in their field is published, and can easily share research articles across a range of social networks. The Society has partnered with the article-level metrics company Altmetric to help users track how content is being discussed online.

As part of the new platform launch, the Society will be introducing cross-journal Article Collections that will be curated by subject experts. This will allow the Society to quickly group together journal articles on hot topics, such as Ebola or antimicrobial resistance, and make them easily discoverable to researchers across the world.

The Society has improved our ‘For Authors’ section, helping contributors select the appropriate journal for their article and guiding them through the user-friendly submissions process. Our editorial policies and our gold open access option, OpenMicrobiology, are also highlighted and explained in easily-navigable sections. In our ‘For Librarians’ section, the new platform features improved administration tools, library branding, and in-depth reporting system.

Leighton Chipperfield, Director of Publishing and Income Diversification at the Society, explained the reasoning behind the change: “Through the new platform, readers will find it easier to discover, use and share content. Authors will see their work enriched and will be able to constantly measure its impact among their peers.”

The Society has partnered with Publishing Technology in the development of the new platform. Michael Cairns, CEO of Publishing Technology, adds: “The Society for General Microbiology is a forward-thinking publisher with a clear digital strategy. The new site integrates our most powerful platform features and we are confident that it will deliver a highly interactive, feature-rich experience befitting the Society’s reputation for high-quality research.”

The new platform can be found on the Journals website.