CrossRef Developments

[Ann Okerson <aokerson@pantheon.yale.edu>]

CrossRef Developments

Reference Linking Service Opens Data Center, Hires Director of Technology,
Adds New Members, and Expands Database

Burlington, MA October 16, 2000 - Ed Pentz, Executive Director of
CrossRef, announced today a number of important developments for the
collaborative reference linking service.  CrossRef, which was formed last
year by the world's leading scientific, technical, and medical publishers,
offers the scientific and scholarly community a milestone in online
publishing -- the ability to click on a reference citation in a journal
and immediately access the cited article.

Mr. Pentz said that CrossRef has now established a state-of-the-art,
dedicated data center at Exodus� Communications, a leading provider of
complex Internet hosting.  The new data center will be fully operational
by the end of October.  CrossRef, which went live in May, has been
operating until now from member publishers' servers.

"I am also pleased to announce that Mark Kosinski has joined CrossRef as
the Director of Technology.  His appointment ensures that CrossRef will be
providing a 24x7 Internet system for its members and making significant
improvements to the system going forward," said Mr. Pentz.  Mr. Koskinki
will manage the CrossRef Data Center, oversee the upgrading and
improvement of CrossRef system and software, and serve as a technical
resource for CrossRef members. He was previously an IT Manager at Nextel
Communciations

Mr. Pentz reported that there are now over 50 publishers participating
inCrossRef, accounting for over 3,100 journals with more than 2 million
article records in the database.  He said that the following publishers
had joined the service over the past few months:

Acoustical  Society of America
American Association of Physicists in
 Medicine
American Association  of Physics Teachers
American College  of Medical Physics
American Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology
American Society of Civil  Engineers
American Society of Mechanical Engineers
American Society of Plant Physiologists
American Vacuum Society
Biomedical Engineering Society
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press Internati
Geological Society of America
The Heart Surgery Forum
Human Kinetics
International Union of Crystallography
IPAP MAIK/Nauka Interperiodica
MIT Press National Institute  on Drug Abuse Pion Ltd
PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)
Society of Rheology
SPIE Technomic

He explained that active discussions continue with many more scientific
and scholarly primary publishers to expand this broad-based, industry-wide
initiative, which was initially announced in November 1999.

CrossRef functions as a sort of digital switchboard. It holds no full-text
content, but rather effects linkages through Digital Object Identifier
(DOI) numbers, which are tagged to article metadata supplied by the
participating publishers. A researcher clicking on a link (the format of
which is determined by publisher preference; for example, a CrossRef
button, or "Article" in html) will be connected to a page on the
publisher's Web site showing a full bibliographical citation of the
article, and, in most cases, the abstract as well. The reader can then
access the full-text article through the appropriate mechanism;
subscribers will generally go straight to the text, while others will
receive information on access via subscription, document delivery, or
pay-per-view. CrossRef costs the researcher nothing; its expenses are
covered by nominal charges to the publishers for depositing their
metadata, annual membership fees, and fees to publishers of abstracting
and indexing databases and libraries for accessing CrossRef's bank of DOIs
to create links to full-text articles.

In the near future, CrossRef will begin incorporating other reference
content such as encyclopedias, textbooks, conference proceedings, and
other relevant literature. Both the organizational structure and the
technology of CrossRef guarantee its rapid and ongoing expansion and its
growing service to publishers, libraries, and researchers worldwide.

CrossRef is run from a central facility operated by Publishers
International Linking Association, Inc. (PILA), and utilizes the DOI to
ensure permanent links. Its Board of Directors includes representatives
from AAAS (Science), Academic Press (Harcourt), AIP, ACM, Blackwell
Science, Elsevier Science, IEEE, Kluwer, Nature, OUP, Springer, and Wiley.

For more information about CrossRef, visit www.crossref.org.