Another group is developing an electronic form to access scholarly, scientific publications. Twelve leading publishers have announced a reference-linking initiative to ease online research activities for scientists. While reading an online article you will be able to access the content of the article's cited references. What has prevented this in the past? An article and its references are usually owned by different publishers.
A cooperative effort among Academic Press, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Institute of Physics, Association of Computing Machinery, Blackwell Science, Elsevier Science, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Kluwer Academic Publisher, Nature, Oxford University Press, Springer-Verlag, and John Wiley & Sons to allow access to each other's publications will be launched the first quarter of this year. Initially, 3 million articles from thousands of journals will be linked. An additional 500,000 articles will be linked each following year.
This reference-linking service will be run from a central facility and operated in cooperation with the International Digital Object Indentifier (DOI) Foundation. The purpose of the Foundation is to support the needs of the intellectual property community in the digital environment, by establishing and governing the DOI System, setting policies for the System, choosing service providers for the System, and overseeing the successful operation of the System.
The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is an identification system for intellectual property in the digital environment. Developed by the International DOI Foundation on behalf of the publishing industry, its goals are to provide a framework for managing intellectual content, link customers with publishers, facilitate electronic commerce, and enable automated copyright management.
Representatives of this initiative are actively recruiting other scientific publishers to join in this initiative. The Reference-Linking Initiative represents a significant step in the rapidly evolving era of electronic publishing. Previous Forum articles have addressed other electronic publishing programs, and are listed under "related links".
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