CrossRef Update Journal Reference Linking Service Names Executive Director, Board
of Directors, New Members, and a "Go Live" Timetable
New York, N.Y. February
2, 2000 - A group of leading scientific and scholarly publishers
today announced the appointment of Ed Pentz as Executive Director
of CrossRef, the collaborative reference-linking service announced
on November 16, 1999. Mr. Pentz, who will be based in Burlington,
Massachusetts, assumed his new position on February 1.
“The reference links enabled by CrossRef will be of great benefit
to scientists. I am looking forward to moving ahead quickly to implement
the service and to signing up more publishers so that CrossRef can
be a comprehensive source for linking journal articles,” said
Mr. Pentz, who was previously Electronic Business Development Manager
at Academic Press.
Mr. Pentz explained that CrossRef will be operated under the aegis
of a not-for-profit organization jointly formed by the member publishers
and recently incorporated as Publishers International Linking Association,
Inc. (PILA). He also reported on the election of its Board of Directors,
which includes Eric A. Swanson, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Chairman;
Pieter Bolman, Academic Press, Treasurer; Michael Spinella, AAAS;
Marc Brodsky, American Institute of Physics; John R. White, Association
for Computing Machinery; John Strange, Blackwell Science; John Regazzi,
Elsevier Science; Anthony Durniak, IEEE; Jeffrey K. Smith, Kluwer
Academic Publishers; Stefan von Holtzbrinck, Nature Publishing Group;
Martin Richardson, Oxford University Press; and Ruediger Gebauer,
Springer-Verlag.
According to Mr. Pentz, Cambridge University Press, Marcel Dekker
Inc., the Royal Society of Chemistry, Portland Press, the American
Mathematical Society, and the American Psychological Association have
recently joined this innovative initiative, bringing the current total
to 22 member publishers. Active discussions are underway with many
more scientific and scholarly primary journal publishers to further
broaden this industry-wide initiative.
CrossRef is scheduled to launch during the first quarter of this year.
Mr. Pentz said that the multi-step process will begin next week when
member publishers begin to submit information about their journal
articles to the CrossRef metadata database. In the weeks and months
that follow, live reference links will begin to appear gradually,
as member publishers use CrossRef to enable them to add reference
links in their journal articles to other publishers’ content.
CrossRef will operate behind-the-scenes by enabling member publishers
to add reference links to their online journals. Users of the online
journals will see, click on, and follow the links directly to the
content; there will be no visible CrossRef interface. Publishers will
control access to their content. CrossRef will be run from a central
facility operated by PILA, and will utilize the Digital Object Identifier
(DOI) to ensure permanent links.
Once the service is fully launched, more than three million articles
across thousands of journals will be linked through CrossRef, and
more than half a million more articles will be linked each year thereafter.
Such linking will enhance the efficiency of browsing and reading the
primary scientific and scholarly literature. It will enable readers
to gain access to logically related articles with one or two clicks
– an objective widely accepted among researchers as a natural
and necessary part of scientific and scholarly publishing in the digital
age. For more information about CrossRef, visit http://www.crossref.org.
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