New Index to Open Access Science
The ScientificCommons launched this month, providing access to over 13 million publications and associations between 6 million authors, all from about 800 repositories. According to the About page the site aims to not only index the metadata and fulltext of open access literature, but also extract information about the authors and provide current-awareness services. The system also archives a local copy of each article indexed. According to the site: "ScientificCommons.org structures and combines the scientific data to knowledge areas with Ontologys. Lexical and statistical methods are used to identify, extract and analyze keywords. Based on this processes ScientificCommons.org classifies the scientific data and uses it e.g. for navigational and weighting purposes." ScientificCommons was develoepd by the Institute for Media and Communications Management at the University of St. Gallen.
I spent a few minutes with the system, which has a very simple interface (the now-expected single search box). Rolling over a citation (recent entries are listed by default) displays basic information in another section of the screen (e.g. keywords, authors, repository), with only title, date and author displayed in the main listing. The Author is clickable and provides a list of (presumably) associated co-authors, which are also clickable. I say presumably, as I searched my own name, found a number of (singly) authored items, clicked my name and was presented with a list of co-authors, none of whom I had ever heard of. I'm not sure how the link was made, but I suspect one of the associated papers has a Mark someone and a someone Leggott, and the link was made. Not perfect yet, but it is Beta...come to think of it, so is Google...
Scraped from iWRBlog
Recent Comments