BioMed Central now supports access from mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

BioMed Central portals and journal websites have been updated so that users on smartphones or tablets have an enhanced experience when viewing full text articles, making better use of small screen sizes and touch-screen functionality. Improving the experience when reading fulltext articles is our first priority, but we will be rolling out further mobile optimizations in the coming months. BioMed Central’s blog network is already optimized for mobile.

Accessing the mobile-friendly version of articles is easy.

BioMed Central uses a ‘responsive’ web design. This means that the website automatically responds to the capabilities of the device that is being used. On a typical desktop computer, the user sees the standard version. On a device with a small screen, the user automatically sees the mobile-optimized appearance, but has the option to switch to the standard desktop view.

If you are viewing the mobile-optimised version of an article, but would like to view the standard desktop version, you can use the link displayed at the bottom of every mobile-optimized page.

Viewing figures

To improve the mobile reading experience, figures are displayed inline rather than as pop-ups.
On all mobile operating systems, clicking a figure will load the high resolution version.
On iOS, used on Apple’s mobile/tablet, the high resolution version of a figure can also be viewed simply by using the ‘pinch and stretch’ motion to zoom in. The high resolution version will then be automatically loaded when needed.

Viewing additional files

The following apps may be useful for viewing additional files:

• Google Earth (iOS, Android), for KML files (e.g. geographic data)
• Molecules (iOS) for viewing MOL files (e.g. chemical structures)
• DropBox (iOS, Android) for storing copies of PDFs or additional files for later desktop access

Support for viewing of videos attached as additional files is planned for a future release.

Reading offline

A convenient way to save articles for offline viewing is to save the PDF to a reader such as iBooks (iOS), a file sharing app such as DropBox (iOS, Android), or to a bibliographic management app such as Papers (iOS) or Mendeley (iOS, Android).

For more information, see the FAQ ‘Does BioMed Central support access from mobile devices?‘