The Berkeley Electronic Press is pleased to announce several improvements to our journals’ infrastructure, in keeping with our mission to be the new standard in scholarly publishing.

Our journal page design now adheres to the fullest standards of accessibility, for readers with disabilities who use screen readers, as well as for readers who view our content on small screens, PDAs, and other devices. All static pages follow U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines, and priorities 1 & 2 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. You can see an example of the new design at http://www.bepress.com/ev. It will be rolled to all bepress journals over the next weeks. For more details, visit http://www.bepress.com/ev/accessibility.html.

Our efforts have already been appreciated. Screenalicious.com, a premier source for showcasing excellent websites, has featured the bepress journal design among their top picks: http://www.screenalicious.com/screen/bepress.com. We were chosen because our new pages are not only attractive, but also accessible.

Samira Vijghen, bepress’s senior web developer, notes that “This is quite an accomplishment for us, from a design point of view. We've come a long way. It's nice to know that not only is our content top notch, but that the code that's driving it is worthy of recognition.”

Finally, bepress will begin to use a standardized list of academic institutions by which scholars can identify themselves when they read, edit, and author in our journals. We are grateful to Michael Viron and General Education Online (GEO) for allowing us to use their extensive list of international institutions. GEO is a web based project started in 1995 that provides a database of links to web sites of educational facilities worldwide. For more information on this generous open-access project, visit http://www.findaschool.org.