CrossRef Update

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

From: lsolomon@wiley.com
To: ann.okerson@yale.edu
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 12:21:17 -0500


Susan Spilka
(212) 850-6147
sspilka@wiley.com

CrossRef Update
Journal Reference Linking Service Names Executive Director, Board of
Directors, New Members, and a Go Live? Timetable

New York, N.Y. February 2, 2000.  

A group of leading scientific and scholarly publishers today announced the
appointment of Ed Pentz as Executive Director of CrossRef, the
collaborative reference-linking service announced on November 16, 1999.  
Mr. Pentz, who will be based in Burlington, Massachusetts, assumed his new
position on February 1.

The reference links enabled by CrossRef will be of great benefit to
scientists.  "I am looking forward to moving ahead quickly to implement
the service and to signing up more publishers so that CrossRef can be a
comprehensive source for linking journal articles," said Mr. Pentz, who
was previously Electronic Business Development Manager at Academic Press.

Mr. Pentz explained that CrossRef will be operated under the aegis of a
not-for-profit organization jointly formed by the member publishers and
recently incorporated as Publishers International Linking Association,
Inc. (PILA).  He also reported on the election of its Board of Directors,
which includes Eric A. Swanson, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Chairman; Pieter
Bolman, Academic Press, Treasurer;  Michael Spinella, AAAS; Marc Brodsky,
American Institute of Physics; John R. White, Association for Computing
Machinery; John Strange, Blackwell Science; John Regazzi, Elsevier
Science; Anthony Durniak, IEEE; Jeffrey K. Smith, Kluwer Academic
Publishers; Stefan von Holtzbrinck, Nature Publishing Group; Martin
Richardson, Oxford University Press; and Ruediger Gebauer,
Springer-Verlag.

According to Mr. Pentz, Cambridge University Press, Marcel Dekker Inc.,
the Royal Society of Chemistry, Portland Press, the American Mathematical
Society, and the American Psychological Association have recently joined
this innovative initiative, bringing the current total to 22 member
publishers.  Active discussions are underway with many more scientific and
scholarly primary journal publishers to further broaden this industry-wide
initiative.

CrossRef is scheduled to launch during the first quarter of this year. Mr.
Pentz said that the multi-step process will begin next week when member
publishers begin to submit information about their journal articles to the
CrossRef metadata database.  In the weeks and months that follow, live
reference links will begin to appear gradually, as member publishers use
CrossRef to enable them to add reference links in their journal articles
to other publishers? content.

CrossRef will operate behind-the-scenes by enabling member publishers to
add reference links to their online journals. Users of the online journals
will see, click on, and follow the links directly to the content; there
will be no visible CrossRef interface.  Publishers will control access to
their content. CrossRef will be run from a central facility operated by
PILA, and will utilize the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to ensure
permanent links.

Once the service is fully launched, more than three million articles
across thousands of journals will be linked through CrossRef, and more
than half a million more articles will be linked each year thereafter.  
Such linking will enhance the efficiency of browsing and reading the
primary scientific and scholarly literature.  It will enable readers to
gain access to logically related articles with one or two clicks ? an
objective widely accepted among researchers as a natural and necessary
part of scientific and scholarly publishing in the digital age.  For more
information about CrossRef, visit http://www.crossref.org.


###