VIEWPOINT

“Going Mobile” for Content Distribution

Patricia K Baskin Editor-in-Chief, Science Editor
Patricia K Baskin
Editor-in-Chief, Science Editor

Among the words related to mobile in the thesaurus that I consulted are flexible, transferable, transportable, moving, unbalanced, unstable, unsteady, and manageable. Each expresses a nuance unlike the others, but all can be said to apply to the world of mobile technology, depending on the perspective of the publisher.

Most of us are now armed with smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers, so we can carry on communication both at work and personally wherever we find ourselves. With the increasing number of devices and mobile formats available, it is a challenge for publishers to select the best strategies for their audiences and decide whether Web versions or apps are the wiser investment. I hope that you will find this issue focusing on the use of mobile devices in publishing to be helpful. Our lead-off article by Mark Johnson discusses the advantages and disadvantages of mobile-optimized sites, responsive Web design, mobile platforms, and apps. The article by Byron Laws describes HTML5, ePub3, and CSS3 formats and provides recommendations for maintaining leadership in mobile-publishing technology. Victoria Wong and I focus on the advantages of tablet apps and the features that they can provide for scholarly audiences, and Anna Jester collates experiences from several publishers in her article “Apps in the Realm of Scholarly Publication”.

Although all our articles are carefully edited, our research articles are also peer reviewed by at least two reviewers. We’re happy to be publishing the peer-reviewed research featured in a 2012 CSE annualmeeting poster by Catherine Kolf and Ann Griswold about factors that contribute to mass-media coverage of published articles. That article is followed by Dan Scott’s story of setting up the openaccess Social Sciences Directory and the Humanities Directory and the challenges that he has encountered. In the spirit of publishing technology, we profile CSE member Liz Blake, who manages development of editing software and regularly presents a session on “Word Tips” at CSE annual meetings.

In this issue, you’ll see some of our regular features—Book Reviews, Ethical Editor, and Marginalia—and some photographs to remind you of the splendid networking that we enjoyed at the annual meeting in Montreal. In addition to those pictures, we’ve included a page of photos featuring the members of the Science Editor Board over the last year. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of them for their contributions and great ideas!

Apr-Jun 2013 • Vol. 36 No. 2 Viewpoint