Science.World: from LJ Newswire

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

For those who may not have seen it, a news clip about a very ambitious
project. Ann

---------- Forwarded message ----------

British Library, U.S. DOE Partner on Science Portal

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."

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