WASHINGTON, DC-The Optical Society of America (OSA) has joined 12 of the world’s leading science, engineering, and technology societies to create direct access to their collective content. In June, the group will launch scitopia.org, a free federated vertical search portal that will enable users to explore the research most cited in scholarly work and patents in a single click.
Scitopia.org will aggregate the entire electronic libraries of the leading voices in major science, engineering and technology disciplines. More than three million documents, including peer-reviewed journal content and conference proceedings spanning 150 years of science and technology, will be searched through this dedicated gateway. Founding partners include: American Geophysical Union (AGU), American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), American Institute of Physics (AIP), American Physical Society (APS), American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), The Electrochemical Society (ECS), IEEE, Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP), Optical Society of America (OSA), SPIE, Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Other organizations will be invited to join as the project progresses.
“Today’s scientific environment is intrinsically multi-discipline. For example, an advance in optics may affect others’ research in aeronautics and vice versa. It’s through shared information that true technological advancements are made, and scitopia.org is a mechanism to help scientists, engineers and researchers navigate today’s information-rich environment in a quicker, more focused manner,” said Elizabeth Rogan, executive director, OSA. “By partnering with our sister societies in a number of fields, scitopia.org will provide an improved alternative to other search engines.”
Visitors to scitopia.org will be presented with a simple, but function-rich interface. They will be able to search for full-text articles using a fielded approach, for example, by article title or author name. Searches will be narrowed to gather very specific publisher content or broadened to scan the complete databases of all the partners. Because scitopia.org links directly to each society’s digital library, searching will access real-time information, providing the most current research.
