AIP Now Provides RSS-based Content Alerts for Its Journals

MELVILLE, NEW YORK, 12 July 2005 — The American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced today that it is now providing RSS-based content alerts for its journals. One AIP journal, Applied Physics Letters (APL), now has RSS feeds available (http://scitation.aip.org/apl/rss.jsp), with extension to other AIP journals to be implemented by the end of August.

RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) allows users to receive the titles and links for the latest articles in a chosen publication or topic. RSS feeds are available from a variety of sources (e.g., news services, journals) and can be read with freely-available software.

“RSS is an extremely timely, article-based, topical alerting service that complements AIP's issue-based e-mail alerts,” said Martin Burke, AIP Journal Publisher. “It also conforms to the needs of users who have come to rely on RSS technology for receiving information.”

Feeds from APL and other AIP journals will be available by topic and for the full content of the journals. As new articles are published in the journals, which have article-at-a-time publishing, they will appear in the RSS feeds. RSS feeds already have been made available for AIP's Physics News Update, Science Policy News, and its flagship magazine Physics Today.

“Because an increasing amount of our content is XML-formatted, the simplicity with which we can produce RSS feeds is enhanced,” said Frank Perugini, AIP’s Director of Online Services. “The XML standard lets us define data with tags such as title, link, product, and description. Once we’ve stored data that has XML tags, it's very easy for a script or database query to retrieve the relevant information for an RSS feed. Through this approach, we can support this capability for other society publications operated on our online hosting service, Scitation^®”

American Institute of Physics (www.aip.org) is a not-for-profit corporation chartered in 1931 to provide publishing and distribution services for scientific and technical societies. AIP is the publisher or co-publisher of 11 journals, two magazines and the AIP Conference Proceedings Series, many of which have the highest impact factors in their category. AIP’s online publishing platform, Scitation, currently hosts more than 500,000 articles from more than 140 scholarly publications for 20 learned society publishers, in fields including physics, chemistry, geology, engineering, acoustics, and other sciences.