An interesting evaluation of sharable metadata being used to enable a
full-text service that reaches across publisher silos.

David 

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Email News Release: April 28, 2004

CrossRef(TM) Launches Pilot Program of CrossRef Search, Powered By
Google

New Initiative Enables Cross-Publisher, Full-Text Searches of the Latest
Medical and Scholarly Research

Lynnfield, MA, April 28, 2004 -- CrossRef announced today a new
initiative
that enables users to search the full text of high-quality,
peer-reviewed
journal articles, conference proceedings, and other resources covering
the
full spectrum of scholarly research from nine leading publishers. Called
CrossRef Search, this new pilot program utilizes the collaborative
environment of CrossRef, the reference-linking service for scholarly
publishing, and Google(TM) search technologies.

"CrossRef is very excited to work with Google on this pilot program.
Researchers, scientists and librarians should find CrossRef Search a
valuable search tool," said Ed Pentz, executive director of CrossRef.
"Now, researchers and students interested in mining published
scholarship
have immediate access to targeted, interdisciplinary and cross-publisher
search on full text using the powerful and familiar Google technology,"
Mr. Pentz continued. "CrossRef Search, like CrossRef itself, breaks down
barriers between publishers on behalf of research and library
communities."

CrossRef Search is available to all users, free of charge, on the
websites
of participating publishers, and encompasses current journal issues as
well as back files. The results are delivered from the regular Google
index but filter out everything except the participating publishers'
content, and will link to the content on publishers' websites via DOIs
(Digital Object Identifiers) or regular URLs. CrossRef itself doesn't
host
any content or perform searches -- CrossRef works behind the scenes with
Google to facilitate the crawling of content on publishers' sites and
sets
the policies and guidelines governing publisher participation in the
initiative. As well as enabling CrossRef Search, the partnership with
Google also means that full-text content from the publishers is also
referenced by the main Google.com index in its more general searches.
Participating publishers, with links to the CrossRef Search pages, are:

- American Physical Society (http://prola.aps.org/xrs.html)
- Annual Reviews (http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/search/external)
- Association for Computing Machinery (http://portal.acm.org/xrs.cfm)
- Blackwell Publishing
(http://www.blackwellsynergy.com/servlet/useragent?func=showSearch&type=
external)
- Institute of Physics Publishing (http://www.iop.org/EJ/search)
- International Union of Crystallography (http://journals.iucr.org/
--click "search" and scroll down the page)
- Nature Publishing Group
(http://www.nature.com/dynasearch/app/dynasearch.taf)
- Oxford University Press (http://hmg.oupjournals.org/search.dtl -- each
journal's search page includes a link)
- John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
(http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/crossref.html)

The CrossRef Search pilot will run through 2004 to evaluate
functionality
and to gather feedback from scientists, scholars and librarians for the
purpose of fine-tuning the program. Participating publishers are also
investigating how DOIs can be used to improve indexing of content and
enable persistent links from search results to the full text of content
at
publishers' sites.  CrossRef is also in discussion with other search
engines.

About CrossRef

CrossRef is an independent membership association (currently it has 300
members), founded and directed by publishers. Its general mission is to
facilitate access to published scholarship through collaborative
technologies. Specifically, CrossRef operates a cross-publisher citation
linking system that enables a researcher to click on a reference
citation
in a journal on one publisher's platform and link to the cited article
at
another publisher's platform.  In this way, CrossRef functions as a sort
of digital switchboard. It holds no full text content, but rather
effects
linkages through DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), which are tagged to
article metadata supplied by the participating publishers. A DOI allows
for persistent linking, because once material has been given a DOI it
never changes, unlike a URL which becomes obsolete when it is moved.
The
end result is an efficient, scalable linking system.

More information about CrossRef is available at http://www.crossref.org.

Contacts:
Amy Brand, CrossRef
(781) 295-0072
[log in to unmask]

Susan Spilka, Wiley
(201) 748-6147
[log in to unmask]

Peter Wrobel, Nature
+44 20 7843 4576
[log in to unmask]

Dawn Peters, Blackwell
(781) 388-8334
[log in to unmask]

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