News

Crossref™ Search Pilot Now Includes 29 Publishers, 3.4 Million Research Articles

21 September 2004

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.

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