A new bioRxiv dashboard widget

One of our goals at bioRxiv is to provide readers with additional context for preprints and alert them to discussion and evaluation of the research presented. This is aggregated in the bioRxiv dashboard, which includes on-site comments, peer reviews from journals and independent peer-review initiatives, automated analyses, and links to discussion of the work in dedicated community forums and the media.

The dashboard is now accessible alongside every article by clicking on a new widget ("Reviews and Context") to the right^* of the abstract. The original launchbar has been re-designed to make it clearer to readers that many preprints have associated comments, evaluations and/or analyses. The new widget uses colored elements to indicate when content is present (these are greyed out if there is no content), and numbers indicate how many items are present.

Clicking on any element in the widget launches the dashboard, and the relevant tab is displayed. Readers can then toggle through horizontal tabs to access comments, peer reviews, community links, automated analyses, videos, and links to coverage of the article in social and mainstream media. In the Comment tab, you can also submit your own comments on the article.

We are currently exploring ways to alert readers to a broader spectrum of social media mentions and welcome feedback on this. The new widget design is intended to help users more easily discover further context and analysis without distracting from the content of the preprint itself^*.

^*On mobile devices the widget displays at the bottom of the page.