From: technews <technews@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: On-Line Journals Plan to Link Millions of Science Footnot
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 17:29:11 -0600
Publishers of On-Line Journals Plan to Link Millions of Science Footnotes
By KELLY McCOLLUM
A coalition of 12 scientific-journal publishers has begun work on a system
that could ease research by interlinking millions of on-line journal
articles.
The reference-linking service would allow a researcher, while reading a
journal article, to click on a footnoted reference and immediately read the
abstract or full text of the cited article, even if it appeared in a
competing journal. The service's debut is scheduled for early next year.
"This cuts out quite a number of steps," says Susan Spilka, a spokeswoman
for John Wiley and Sons Inc., one of the journal publishers involved in the
project. "You're doing research, you look at a footnote, it's an article
that interests you, but instead of jotting it down and remembering to go
look for it, you just click on it and you're there," she says.
At its start, the system will include about 3,000 journals with about three
million articles, says Ms. Spilka. New articles will be added to the system
at a rate of about 500,000 per year, she says. The plan is currently limited
to scientific journals, but Ms. Spilka says that if demand is sufficient,
the system could be expanded to include journals in other disciplines, such
as the social sciences.
Wiley and the 11 other publishers will form a non-profit organization to
oversee and maintain the system, which will require a centralized data base
to keep track of the links between journals. The data base will rely on
digital object identifiers -- tags that are added to information in a way
that will allow one journal publisher to link to articles in another
journal, regardless of its on-line format.
A researcher reading an article in an on-line journal would click on a
footnote, sending a query to the central data base. The central server
would then find the corresponding article, determine its location on the
Internet, and direct the researcher's Web browser to the right location.
Ms. Spilka says that "at a bare minimum, the researchers will reach the
abstract of the article." In most cases, the full text of the article will
be available if the researcher's institution has a subscription to the
journal or if the journal offers its articles free.
Gay Dannelly, assistant director for collections at Ohio State University's
library, says the idea sounds promising. "I think anything that helps our
users search across publishers more effectively can only be a good thing for
libraries."
The publishers hope to have the service on line early next year. According
to Ms. Spilka, the total cost of the project has not been determined yet,
but the partners are sharing the expense of getting it started. Eventually,
individual publishers will be charged small fees to participate, possibly
paying each time readers of their journals use the service.
Ms. Spilka says that the project is open to any journal publisher wishing to
join, and that the organizers hope to include as many as possible. Besides
Wiley, the founding members are the Academic Press, the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Physics, the
Association for Computing Machinery, Blackwell Science, Elsevier Science,
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., Kluwer Academic
Publishers, Nature, Oxford University Press, and Springer-Verlag.
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Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education