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Reference Linking Service Announces Name More Scientific and Scholarly Publishers Join CrossrefLondon, England. 9 December 1999. A group of leading scientific and scholarly publishers today announced a name for their reference-linking service to link their journal articles -- Crossref -- as well as the names of four more publishers who have joined this innovative initiative. The University of Chicago Press, the Institute of Physics Publishing World Scientific, and Taylor & Francis will be joining this unprecedented cooperative effort, which also includes Academic Press, a Harcourt Science and Technology Company (NYSE:H); American Association for the Advancement of Science (the publisher of Science); American Institute of Physics (AIP); Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); Blackwell Science; Elsevier Science (NYSE:ENL) (NYSE:RUK); IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.); Kluwer Academic Publishers (a Wolters Kluwer Company); Nature Publishing Group; Oxford University Press; Springer-Verlag; and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (NYSE:JWa) (NYSE:JWb). Active discussions are underway with many scientific and scholarly primary journal publishers to make this a broad-based, industry-wide initiative. More are expected to sign on before the service launches during the first quarter of 2000. Crossref was initially announced on November 16. Commenting on Crossref, Robert Shirrell, Journals Manager, The University of Chicago Press, said, "Reference links are a critical part of the utility of electronic publications. This linking service, a voluntary cooperative effort based on an open standard, provides the means for enhancing electronic publications across all scholarly fields." Jerry Cowhig, Managing Director, Institute of Physics Publishing, added, “One of the key objectives of the Institute's Royal Charter is the dissemination of scientific information to physicists world-wide. This exciting, collaborative initiative will further that objective and help us to realize our vision of e-distributed publishing. By working together publishers should at last achieve seamless linking between online content, wherever it resides.” Doreen Liu, Managing Director, World Scientific, said, “This is the most exciting initiative from the STM group of publishers I can remember during my 18 years in the business. World Scientific was set up with the objective of serving the scientific community and I believe this initiative will greatly enhance our ability to do so.” Researchers will be able to move easily from a reference in a journal article to the content of a cited journal article, typically located on a different server and published by a different publisher. At the outset, 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. This will enhance the efficiency of browsing and reading the primary scientific and scholarly literature. Such linking 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. Crossref will be run from a central facility which will be managed by an elected Board and will operate in cooperation with the International Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Foundation. It will contain a limited set of metadata, allowing the journal content and links to remain distributed at publishers' sites. Each publisher will set its own access standards, determining what content is available to the researcher following a link (such as access to the abstract or to the full text of an article, by subscription, document delivery, or pay-per-view, etc.). Crossref is being organized as a not-for-profit entity to safeguard the independence of each participating publisher to set their own access standards and conditions. The service, which is based on a prototype developed by Wiley and Academic Press, was developed in cooperation with the International DOI Foundation and builds on work by the Association of American Publishers and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. It takes advantage of the DOI standard and other World Wide Web standards and Internet technology. By taking a standards-based approach the international initiative is confident that the sophisticated demands of the readers of scientific and scholarly journals for linking of references can be implemented broadly and rapidly. PLEASE NOTE: There will be an update and presentation on Crossref on Friday, 10 December 1999, from 15:15 to 16:00 at the Copthorne Tara Hotel, Scarsdale Place, London W8 5SR. tel +44 171 937 7211 (Underground: High Street Kensington). Senior executives from among those publishers who are the initial participants will take questions. The press is invited to attend this session of the STM Innovations Seminar, which will include a project demonstration, a status report, and a question and answer period. For more information, contact Chris Gardner at +44 171 496 3318. CROSSREF PARTICIPANTS: ACADEMIC PRESS AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS (AIP) ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING MACHINERY BLACKWELL SCIENCE ELSEVIER SCIENCE IEEE (THE INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS, INC. )
INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS PUBLISHING INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER FOUNDATION KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP SPRINGER-VERLAG TAYLOR & FRANCIS THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC. WORLD SCIENTIFIC |
