About
16 April 2007
OSA Joins Sci-Tech Societies to Create Comprehensive Research Site
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Lyndsay Meyer
The Optical Society
+1.202.416.1435
lmeyer@osa.org
OSA JOINS SCI-TECH SOCIETIES TO CREATE
COMPREHENSIVE RESEARCH SITE
Scitopia.org searches 3 million articles, spanning 150 years of scholarship
WASHINGTON, April 16 – The Optical Society of America (OSA) is pleased to announce that it has joined 12 of the world's leading science, engineering and technology societies to create direct access to their collective content. In June, the group will launch scitopia.org, a free federated vertical search portal that will enable users to explore the research most cited in scholarly work and patents in a single click.
Scitopia.org will aggregate the entire electronic libraries of the leading voices in major science, engineering and technology disciplines. More than 3 million documents, including peer-reviewed journal content and conference proceedings spanning 150 years of science and technology, will be searched through this dedicated gateway. Founding partners include:
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)
American Institute of Physics (AIP)
American Physical Society (APS)
American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
The Electrochemical Society (ECS)
IEEE
Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP)
Optical Society of America (OSA)
SPIE
Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE)
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)
Other organizations will be invited to join as the project progresses.
"Today's scientific environment is intrinsically multi-discipline. For example, an advance in optics may affect others' research in aeronautics and vice versa. It's through shared information that true technological advancements are made, and scitopia.org is a mechanism to help scientists, engineers and researchers navigate today's information-rich environment in a quicker, more focused manner," said Elizabeth Rogan, executive director, OSA. "By partnering with our sister societies in a number of fields, scitopia.org will provide an improved alternative to other search engines."
Visitors to scitopia.org will be presented with a simple, but function-rich interface. They will be able to search for full-text articles using a fielded approach, for example, by article title or author name. Searches will be narrowed to gather very specific publisher content or broadened to scan the complete databases of all the partners. Search results will include the article's title, authors and citation. Once a piece of content is selected, the user will be directed to the publishers' digital library site to access the full text. Researchers at institutions with subscriptions to the content will be automatically authenticated and will be able to click through to it. Members of partner societies may also be able to access full text, depending upon the association's membership policies. Pay-per-view options will allow others to purchase as many articles as they choose.
As a federated search, no new subscriptions are needed to use scitopia.org. For example, a subscriber to a single journal published by OSA could access the content via scitopia.org or through www.osa.org. Additionally, because scitopia.org links directly to each society's digital library, searching will access real-time information, providing the most current research.
About scitopia.org
The federated vertical search portal scitopia.org was created through the imagination and collaboration of 13 leading science and technology societies: American Geophysical Union (www.agu.org); American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (www.aiaa.org); American Institute of Physics (www.aip.org); American Physical Society (www.aps.org); American Society of Civil Engineers (www.asce.org); American Society of Mechanical Engineers (www.asme.org); The Electrochemical Society (www.electrochem.org); IEEE (www.ieee.org); Institute of Physics Publishing (www.iop.org); Optical Society of America (www.osa.org); SPIE (www.spie.org); Society of Automotive Engineers (www.sae.org); and, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (www.siam.org). Scitopia.org will go live June 2007.
About OSA
Uniting more than 70,000 professionals from 134 countries, the Optical Society of America (OSA) brings together the global optics community through its programs and initiatives. Since 1916 OSA has worked to advance the common interests of the field, providing educational resources to the scientists, engineers and business leaders who work in the field by promoting the science of light and the advanced technologies made possible by optics and photonics. OSA publications, events, technical groups and programs foster optics knowledge and scientific collaboration among all those with an interest in optics and photonics. For more information, visit www.osa.org.
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