09 December 1999
London, 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; SpringerVerlag; 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 broadbased, industrywide 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 worldwide. This exciting, collaborative initiative will further that objective and help us to realize our vision of edistributed 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 payperview, 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
(A HARCOURT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COMPANY)
www.academicpress.com
Contact:
Ken Metzner
001 (619) 6996830
kmetzner@acad.com
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
(THE PUBLISHER OF SCIENCE)
http://www.sciencemag.org
Contact:
Nan Broadbent
Director, News and Information
001 (202) 3266440
nbroadbe@aaas.org
AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS (AIP)
http://www.aip.org
Contact:
Tim Ingoldsby
Director of Business Development
(631) 576 2266
TINGOLDSBY@AIP.ORG
ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING MACHINERY
http://www.acm.org
Contact:
Bernard Rous
ACM Deputy Director of Publications
001 (212) 6260660
rous@hg.acm.org
BLACKWELL SCIENCE
https://www.blackwellpublishing.com/
Contact:
Robert Campbell
Managing Director
001 (212) 6260660
robert.campbell@blacksci.co.uk
ELSEVIER SCIENCE
http://www.elsevier.com
Contact:
Karen Hunter
Senior Vice President, Elsevier Science
001 (212) 6333787
k.hunter@elsevier.com
IEEE
(THE INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS, INC.)
http://www.ieee.org
Contact:
Anthony Durniak
Staff Executive, Publications
001 (732) 562 3998
h.horwitz@ieee.org
INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS PUBLISHING
https://ioppublishing.org/
Contact:
Terry Hulbert
Head of Electronic Marketing
+44 (0) 117 930 1047
terry.hulbert@ioppubli shing.co.uk
INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER FOUNDATION
http://www.doi.org
Contact:
Norman Paskin
Director, International DOI Foundation
+44 (0) 1865 843798
n.paskin@doi.org
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
(A WOLTERS KLUWER COMPANY)
http://www.wolterskluwer.com
Contact:
Alexander Schimmelpenninck
Director Corporate Communications
Wolters Kluwer N.V.
+31 20 60 70 335
aschimmelpenninck@wolterskluwer.com
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
http://www.oup.co.uk
Contact:
Martin J Richardson
Publishing Director
+44 (0)1865 267780
richarm@oup.co.uk
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
www.nature.com
Contact:
Stefan von Holtzbrinck
Managing Director, Nature Publishing Group
+44 (0) 171 843 4632
SPRINGERVERLAG
springerny.com
https://0-www-springer-com.libus.csd.mu.edu/de
Contact:
Howard Ratner
Director, Electronic Publishing & Production
SpringerVerlag
New York, Inc.
001 (212) 4601615
hratner@springerny.com
TAYLOR & FRANCIS
arakhne.tandf.co.uk/index.htm
Contact:
Stephen Neal
Group Publishing Director
+44 (0) 171 583 9855
stephen.neal@tandf.co.uk
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu
Contact:
Evan Owens
Electronic Publishing Manager, Journals Division
001 (773) 753 3375
eowens@journals.uchicago.edu
JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.
http://www.wiley.com
Contact:
Susan Spilka
Corporate Communications Director
(001) (212) 8506147
sspilka@wiley.com
WORLD SCIENTIFIC
http://www.worldscientific.com
Contact:
Chi Wai (Rick) Lee
Deputy Director, Electronic Publishing
+65 4665775
cwlee@wspc.com.sg
Please contact our communications team with any questions.
