Science Journals to Link up on Internet
11/16/99
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Title: Science Journals to Link up on Internet
Source: Reuters News Service
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: November 16,1999
WASHINGTON-- Twelve publishers of scientific and scholarly journals
said on Tuesday they were linking up on the Internet to make it
easier for scientists to do research.
The cooperation agreement allies some of the biggest rivals in the
highly lucrative arena of scientific publishing, including Oxford
University Press, Macmillan Magazines Ltd. and Elsevier Science.
They said the agreement would link three million articles at first,
and even more later.
"This is extremely good news for the active scientists and
researchers all over the world," Johannes Velterop, publishing
director of the science journal Nature, said in a statement.
"The interest of the users of scientific information is put at the
centre of the stage again, and publishers clearly recognise the
imperative of serving the research community in the very best way the
new technology allows."
Scientific publishers wield a huge amount of clout in the research
world. Generally, a piece of research is not recognised until it is
accepted by a scholarly journal for publication, and subjected to
review by "peers" -- usually other scientists in the field who can
say whether the basis of the study is sound. Scientists also cite the
work of other researchers in their work. This appears as a series of
footnotes at the end of their reports, and the citations can refer to
a large number of reports published in other journals.
Unless a scientist has a subscription to all the journals, or access
to a library or Internet resource that carries them, he or she cannot
read the cited articles, which may provide crucial background.
The new agreement will allow them to link automatically from an
Internet version of one journal to the article cited in another,
using just a click of the mouse or two.
"More researchers today are using the Internet in their work and this
service will allow them to do so more quickly and efficiently,"
Richard Nicholson, executive officer of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal
Science, said.
The agreement links Academic Press, a Harcourt Science and Technology
company, the AAAS, the American Institute of Physics, the Association
for Computing Machinery, Blackwell Science, Elsevier Science, the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE),
Kluwer Academic Publishers, Nature, which is published by Macmillan,
Oxford University Press, Springer-Verlag, and John Wiley & Sons,
Inc..
They said they expected to launch it in the first quarter of 2000.