June 23, 2017
For Immediate Release
Media Contact:
Robert Frederick
Digital Managing Editor of American Scientist Online
Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society
rfrederick@sigmaxi.org or 800-243-6534 ext. 254
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. ― American Scientist magazine announces the launch of its redesigned website at www.americanscientist.org. The bi-monthly publication about science, engineering, and technology from Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society relaunched its site to improve the reader experience, especially for readers using mobile devices.
The site now offers content based on visitor preferences: Readers can choose to view content by subject or media type, for example.
Jamie Vernon, editor-in-chief of American Scientist, led the development of the website concept with input from the Sigma Xi team and the magazine’s readers. He noted that the redesigned site capitalizes on organic content discovery via social media and shared links.
“Once readers arrive at the new site, often after following a link shared in social media, they can find similarly appealing content quickly, whether by type [videos, podcasts, features, blogs, book reviews, and the like] or by topic [astronomy, engineering, biology, and so on],” said Vernon. “Additionally, they’ll be able to share easily using tools embedded in the platform. It’s eminently searchable and shareable.”
The site’s customization heightens the reader experience with content discovery and the way the content is presented, said Robert Frederick, digital managing editor of American Scientist Online, who served as the redesign’s project manager. “We’ve designed the site to host new formats, what we’re calling digital features, which will add new dimensions to the users’ experience—audio, video, yes, but also interactivity—that just aren’t possible in print or on the old website.”
This project included converting all of previous website’s articles to take advantage of that new mobile-friendly format. “That’s an enormous task because it involves literally thousands of articles, each with multiple images, graphs, captions, pull quotes, and links between them,” said Frederick. “So we decided to go live with just the past five years’ worth of content—going back to January 2012.”
The current year’s content is formatted for the new site. In the coming months, more back issues will be reformatted and made available on the new website. Archives of American Scientist and its predecessor Sigma Xi Quarterly—including all issues published from 1913 through 2011—are available on JSTOR at www.jstor.org/journal/amerscie, so readers who may need an old magazine article or issue in the meantime can still retrieve the content.