press release

CROSSREF SEARCH PILOT NOW INCLUDES 29 PUBLISHERS, 3.4 MILLION RESEARCH ARTICLES

LYNNFIELD, MA, September 21, 2004 -- CrossRef, the reference-linking service for scholarly publishing, announced today that its pilot initiative in collaboration with Google has added 20 additional publishers during the past four months. There are now 29 publishers participating in the CrossRef Search pilot that includes over 3.4 million scholarly research articles. Users can search the full text of high-quality, peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, monographs, and other resources covering the full spectrum of scholarly research.

“The involvement of so many publishers highlights the value of the CrossRef Search pilot. The pilot provides targeted, interdisciplinary, cross-publisher search that makes it easier to find relevant research material,” said Ed Pentz, Executive Director of CrossRef. “In addition to adding new publishers, CrossRef has started to get very valuable feedback on the pilot service from researchers, librarians, and scientists.”

CrossRef Search is available to all users, free of charge, on the websites of participating publishers, and encompasses current journal issues as well as back files. The results are delivered from the regular Google index but filter out everything except the participating publishers’ content, and links to the content on publishers’ websites via DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) or regular URLs. CrossRef itself doesn’t host any content or perform searches – CrossRef works behind the scenes with Google to facilitate the crawling of content on publishers’ sites, and sets the policies and guidelines governing publisher participation in the initiative. As well as enabling CrossRef Search, the partnership with Google means that full-text content from the publishers is also referenced by the main Google.com index in its more general searches. Participating publishers include:

American Physical Society

Annual Reviews

Ashley Publications

Association for Computing Machinery

BioMed Central

Blackwell Publishing

BMJ (British Medical Journal) Publishing Group

Cambridge University Press

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

FASEB (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology)

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.)

INFORMS (Information Management Specialists, Inc.)

Institute of Physics Publishing

International Union of Crystallography

Investigative Ophthamology and Visual Science

Journal of Clinical Oncology

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

Medicine Publishing Group

Nature Publishing Group

Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag

Oxford University Press

PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

Royal College of Psychiatrists

Springer-Verlag

Taylor & Francis

University of California Press

University of Chicago Press

Vathek Publishing

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Publishers participating in the CrossRef Search pilot are surveying users of the tool on an on-going basis. “Initial responses are very positive and suggest that CrossRef Search is meeting or exceeding user expectations. Some users have indicated a desire for more publishers’ scholarly material to be included—something we are working toward with the addition of 20 publishers,” added Mr. Pentz.

The CrossRef Search pilot began in January 2004 with nine publishers. It will run through the end of 2004 to evaluate functionality and to gather feedback from scientists, scholars and librarians for the purpose of fine-tuning the program. Participating publishers are also investigating how DOIs can be used to improve indexing of content and enable persistent links from search results to the full text of content at publishers’ sites. CrossRef Search may work with other leading search technologies in the future.

About CrossRef

CrossRef is an independent membership association, founded and directed by publishers. It currently includes over 650 publishers and societies. Its general mission is to facilitate access to published scholarship through collaborative technologies. Specifically, CrossRef operates a cross-publisher citation linking system that enables a researcher to click on a reference citation in content on one publisher’s platform and link to the cited article at another publisher’s platform. CrossRef is the official DOI registration agency for scholarly and professional publications.

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