Elsevier's Digital Services Upgraded to Provide Enhanced Searching and Mobile Capabilities

PHILADELPHIA, June 4, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

Elsevier's 500+ journal-branded custom websites in health, medical, and life sciences to be equipped for semantic search and improved mobile reading experience

Elsevier, a word-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced a major investment in services provided to its society partners and individual readers: a new online platform and management system for its 500+ health, medical, and life science journal-branded websites.

The new online platform will provide these journal-branded websites improved search results accuracy, a more robust editorial tool to create topical article collections, and a high quality reading experience for visitors using mobile devices. The upgrades will begin this Fall.

Elsevier's new journal-branded web hosting service is state of the art, powered by Elsevier's Smart Content, which provides world-leading semantic enrichment technologies in health, medical, and life sciences through the application of EMMeT™ (Elsevier Merged Medical Taxonomy). Beyond delivering improved search results, this semantically tagged content powers a robust editorial collection tool to create automated or curated topic collections. The new web hosting service was developed using Atypon^® Literatum™. Upgrades include an advanced mobile device adapted presentation through the use of Literatum for Mobile™.

"We look forward to using the new collection tool for editors that Elsevier is planning," said Dr. Craig Niederberger, Head of Urology at the University of Illinois, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Fertility & Sterility and Urological Survey Section Editor of The Journal of Urology^®. "These semantic technologies are needed to assist editors in offering navigation and article collections organized around topics that are relevant to readers."

Smart Content provides readers with improved search accuracy by mapping EMMeT's extensive taxonomy to each journal article and webpage on a granular level. Founded on a core of UMLS (Unified Medical Language System), EMMeT contains select terms from standard vocabularies such as MeSH, SNOMED CT, RxNorm, ICD9 & 10, and LOINC. Manually curated by a team of taxonomists, EMMeT also includes an extensive custom vocabulary of jargon (abbreviations and acronyms) to reflect natural language. As a whole, EMMeT has more than one million concepts and three million synonyms of which 250,000 concepts are core clinical. Branches include diseases, drugs, procedures, anatomy, clinical findings and symptoms, organisms and substances.

In addition, through the use of html5 mobile browser technology, the upgrade ensures all journal-branded sites operated by Elsevier recognize mobile device visitors and present to them a device-optimized website, meaning that when the user is accessing the site via a mobile device the content will automatically display in a mobile-friendly format.

"Kudos! I've seen the mobile-formatted website for Fertility & Sterility, and the design is beautiful. We're impressed with the greater readability of the forthcoming website version from mobile devices. So many physicians keep up to date from their mobile phone - this is needed to complement our journal iTunes app," added Dr. Niederberger.

"The priorities for this investment reflect what Elsevier has heard from its journal subscribers as well as what societies have expressed as their top digital platform priorities," said Glen Campbell, Elsevier's Executive Vice President of Society Business Development. "We look forward to customizing these services carefully with each of our society partners. We will extend this new platform's capability to our society journals in the Physical and Social Sciences as we expand our society business in those domains."

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include ScienceDirect, Scopus, Reaxys, ClinicalKey and Mosby's Suite, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc, a world leading provider of professional information solutions. The group employs more than 30,000 people, including more than 15,000 in North America. Reed Elsevier Group plc is owned equally by two parent companies, Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. Their shares are traded on the London, Amsterdam and New York Stock Exchanges using the following ticker symbols: London: REL; Amsterdam: REN; New York: RUK and ENL.

Media contact
Christopher Capot
Director, Corporate Relations
Elsevier
+1-212-633-3164
c.capot@elsevier.com