Equation Accessibility on ScienceDirect.com, Encouraging Global Collaboration
I like the MathML and equation accessibility of your pages. I am at https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/observability right now.
But suggest you integrate some tools to immediately use the equations. You have LOTS of them on your site, and they are disconnected fragments. Collectively they can change the world.
And, there is no sense of community on this page. It is just you giving me (one individual) a look at some things that were written long ago and the people probably not accessible or even still active. What you might want to think about is all the people who visit pages working together. Yes, I know there are many purposes and reasons, backgrounds and skills out there. But if you begin to let people comment, interact, connect, collaborate – that is the way of the future. You can get started and have a background in it, when others do not. Overall ScienceDirect is doing many good things. But it could be much better. You can start with changing “feedback” from “do you like us” to “How can everyone using ScienceDirect.com work together to improve the world?”
Let people share. I posted these, my thoughts, at /?p=1976 but discussions about your methods and practices, your goals and purposes, the needs of your users – should be on your site, and with your users engaged and working together.
If you respect the ideas and opinions of your visitors enough to ask them for “feedback”, then do them the courtesy of treating them as real people, with real names. It is not a random street interview where you don’t care who says something. Do you want your users to succeed? Many of them are working on similar things. You try to suggest things for individuals to read. But the greater gain for society is when you help them work together and to find the things that are important.
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
RichardCollins@TheInternetFoundation.Org
Next Day:
There seems to be a missing font character. Look for the question mark in “where ? is the wavelength of the resonant X-rays, a is the internal conversion coefficient, and I, I’ are the spins of nuclear ground and excited state.”
A calculator for unit conversions would help. That can be added by each person, but you can help readers crossing discipline boundaries or in cross-cutting areas by basic unit conversions and symbolic manipulations, and look up of constants and material properties.
Looking at https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/thomson-scattering
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
