At The EMBO Meeting 2016, held in Germany earlier this week, EMBO and John Wiley and Sons, Inc. launched the ‘SmartFigures Lab’, a prototype online publishing website. SmartFigures are interactive figures that link data to biological databases and to related data across papers, enabling users to navigate across literature through interconnected figures. The demo currently includes approximately 8000 SmartFigures from 300 papers and has been built on EMBO’s SourceData platform. Rather than indexing keywords in an article, which may provide a subjective interpretation of the results, SourceData directly searches experimental data and their inter-relations. Over 15,000 experiments from papers across 23 journals have been tagged by SourceData to date.

Thomas Lemberger, SourceData Project Leader at EMBO commented that “By linking results between papers into a network of related information – a scientific ‘knowledge graph’ – SourceData applications such as SmartFigures may open new ways for scientists to work with scientific articles as data-rich research tools.”

The project is part of an ongoing 8-year partnership between Wiley and EMBO.

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Summary by Louise Niven, DPhil from Aspire Scientific.