In the latest step toward the likely future of scholarly electronic publishing, 12 academic publishers in conjunction with the International Digital Object Identifier foundation have joined together to launch an online reference linking service that will provide comprehensive links between the references of millions of online journal articles.
The as-yet-unnamed new service will be launched in the first quarter of 2000. It is based on the DOI-X, a prototype metadata database and reference search engine, developed in conjunction with the Association of American Publishers and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI)and demonstrated earlier this fall at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The DOI technology is a persistent identifying tag embedded in digital content that can contain bibliographic or copyright information. Among the 12 cooperating publishers are John Wiley & Sons, Oxford University Press, Springer-Verlag, Elsevier Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers, the American Institute of Physics and several other scientific organizations.
Craig Van Dyck, v-p of production, manufacturing and STM publishing at Wiley, told PW the new service will allow researchers to "go from a citation at the end of an article directly to the content itself." Van Dyck noted that the service will initially link about three million articles from the thousands of journals published by the cooperating publishers. The project will subsequently add at least 500,000 new articles a year. Van Dyck emphasized that the initial 12 publishers are "only the first wave" and that the cooperative is currently in negotiations to add more publishers and substantially more online journal content. Many of the publishers in this new initiative were a part of the AAP-CNRI cooperative that developed the DOI standards (www.doi.org).
The reference linking service makes use of a database technology that automatically inserts DOIs into reference citations at the end of scholarly articles, providing a live link to related research content. The system, according to Van Dyck, will allow researchers to click through from a reference article to the content of a citation located on a different server run by a different publisher.
Van Dyck noted that it will be up to publishers to decide on what level of access--abstract or full-text, subscription, document delivery or pay-per-view--the system will provide. Van Dyck told PW that "the system is expected to increase the traffic at each publisher's site to the degree that they will have to consider e-commerce solutions."
