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February 02, 2007
British Library, U.S. DOE Partner on Science Portal
News item from LJ Newswire posted to the Science & Technology Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries.
The British Library (BL) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
have announced a collaborative effort to develop a global science
gateway, to be named Science.world. The free online resource will
eventually make accessible science information resources from
many countries via a single Internet portal. Following the model
of Science.gov, offered by a group of U.S. federal agencies, the
Science.world effort will rely on scientific resources published
by each participating nation.
"Our goal is to speed up the sharing of knowledge on a global
scale. As a result, we believe that science itself will speed
up," said Raymond Orbach, DOE undersecretary for science.
For the DOE, the project marks a return of sorts. On November 4,
2002, the lights went out on PubSCIENCE, the DOE's effort to
offer a free multi-disciplinary database in the physical
sciences. PubSCIENCE allowed users to search across abstracts and
citations of multiple publishers at no cost. The effort quickly
became the target of an intense lobbying campaign, spearheaded by
the Washington-based Software & Information Industry Association
(SIIA), which claimed that PubSCIENCE competed with its members'
services.
It was not immediately clear what resources the new portal would
provide, although a British Library news release said the
project's aim was "direct, free searching of open source
collections and portals" that would "complement existing
information collections and systems."
Posted by amcmanus at February 2, 2007 08:50 AM