Melville, NY, September 9, 2009 — A physicist created the World Wide Web in 1989 as a tool for helping far-flung scientific collaborators share data, and in the two decades since its invention, the Web has changed the world. Now a new Web-based tool for the physics community, called AIP UniPHY, promises to help physicists change the world again.
Announced today by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and Collexis Holdings, Inc., AIP UniPHY is a scientific networking site for physical scientists. It allows them to search for collaborators, see what competitors are up to, communicate with colleagues, and exhibit their own latest work.
"Worldwide collaborations between scientists certainly enable more rapid advances toward the development and implementation of many of the modern technologies we often take for granted," says National Science Board member Louis Lanzerotti, who is chair of AIP's governing board.
"This new site should help scientists collaborate as never before — and immediately so," says AIP Executive Director and CEO H. Frederick Dylla, who will announce the launch of AIP UniPHY on Thursday, September 10 at the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers meeting in the United Kingdom. "This new service will help level the playing field when it comes to worldwide physics by bringing scientists and their latest findings closer than ever, faster than ever."
"AIPUniPHY.org further demonstrates how the Collexis proprietary Fingerprinting technology can be applied in any scientific discipline," states Bill Kirkland, CEO of Collexis. "We are looking forward to working with AIP on the expansion of the AIP UniPHY network as well as working with their affiliated publisher partners so that they too will be able to provide their respective communities with this very innovative professional network platform."
Unlike Facebook and other social networking sites that rely upon outside users to join and populate their databases with a galaxy of linked information, AIP UniPHY comes pre-populated with the profiles of hundreds of thousands of scientists from more than 100 countries, all interconnected by virtue of their publication histories.
Any scientist who has published at least three articles over the past ten years in one of the more than 100 journals in the Searchable Physics Information Notices (SPIN) database has a profile on AIP UniPHY. Each profile is connected to a network of other profiles that belong to a person's co-authors on any paper. And each profile is also connected to all the co-authors of any co-authors — whether that profile belongs to a graduate student, post-doc, professor, Nobel laureate, or the U.S. Secretary of Energy.
On the existing site, users can look at other authors' publishing records, view lists of co-authors, and browse for collaborations by research category. The site will evolve over the coming months to include many additional collaborative features, data sources, and social networking functions.
The new networking site can be viewed online. The site is meant for working scientists, but anyone can set up an account and view the networks.