Better figures to enhance your reading experience

Time is precious and many researchers use figures to prioritize what to read from the scholarly literature. Today, we’re pleased to announce changes in the presentation and layout of PLoS figures that will make it easier to determine if an article is relevant to you, giving you more time to spend on the science that you love.

In-line figures will now be displayed much larger than before allowing you to more easily understand the content of a figure. When you click a figure to expand it, you’ll notice our brand new in-page figure viewer with improved navigation options.

And to make it easy to quickly skim through the figures of an article, we’ve added a button at the top of the article that will launch our new figure viewer.

To make re-use of figures even simpler, you can now download figures as PowerPoint slides – the figure title and citation information are automatically provided which makes them more portable. Naturally, because our articles are Open Access and published under the CC-BY attribution license, you are free to re-use PLoS figures without restriction as long as you cite the author and original source.

This is the first in a series of forthcoming journal improvements that we will be rolling out on a continual basis – so watch this blog for tagged posts.