blog

This morning the dev team at F1000Workspace is abuzz with the update to HTTPS, which means all our users’ interactions are encrypted. It was a big task and a lot of effort went into making sure that the release went smoothly and on time.

This and a host of other updates have taken place on the platform since our last release notes blog, and I thought it was about time to give you brief information about what we’ve been up to and the benefits to you.

If you have any feedback about these or other features you can get in touch either by email or by commenting below.

On the Edge

One of our best loved features is our browser extensions, because they make it easy to import articles and other references as you come across them online. Until now we supported Chrome, Firefox, Internet explorer, Opera and Safari.

Today, we can proudly say that we are one of the few products that also support Edge. So, if you are a proud, or even shy, Edge user, you can now easily import articles and PDFs directly to your F1000Workspace. More than that, you can also highlight and comment on the articles, and, when you share it with your friends, discuss it directly on the page.

Imports make it easy

We want to make it easy for you to import items to F1000Workspace. We already had a straightforward way to import your existing references from Endnote, Mendeley, Zotero, Papers and any other software, but for PDFs you needed to have installed our desktop app. Not anymore!

If you want to try before fully committing to us, you can import up to 100 PDFs straight from your browser, or attach a full text PDF to a reference. That said, you still get great benefits from installing our desktop app; not only will you get our intuitive Word plugin to cite your references, but at the click of a button we try to download the PDF for an article on your library (you still need to have permission to access PDF). Plus, if you are importing your library from EndNote or Papers, the desktop app will also import the PDFs associated with your references.

And as we are talking about importing PDFs, our PDF parsing is also better than ever, detecting all the metadata (title, author, journal and other publication info) in the great majority of PDFs.

Reading off-line

If you are travelling, staying in a remote place or simply decide to switch off the internet to concentrate on your work, you may still need to check your PDFs. As F1000Workspace is cloud based, it allows you to access your PDFs from anywhere and almost any device…as long as you have internet access. Until now…

We have taken our first step to fully support offline use of F1000Workspace; all the references and associated PDFs that are in your Reading list can be synced to your computer and opened in the desktop app – another benefit of having it! We know that there is more to be done, and we are working to support highlights and notes; soon you will be able to read, edit, delete and add new notes that can be synced once you are back online.

Stay in touch and I hope you enjoy using F1000Workspace.