RE: Science Online and linking

[Kimberly Parker <kimberly.parker@yale.edu>]

I'd like to take off a little on the thread of linking (to and fro) here.
In my opinion, one of the greatest potential benefits of ejournals, at the
present time, is the ability to link directly from an abstracting and
indexing tool (such as Medline) and the ability to link from citation
end-notes to other articles and/or back to the abstracting and indexing
tools.

The Science Online version links out to PubMed, but to the best of my
knowledge, PubMed does not yet link directly to Science Online.  I can
hope that AAAS and HighWire Press are negotiating this with NLM.

Right now, the OVID Science offering provides links (both to and fro)
between their Medline file and Science (and other titles in the
Journals@OVID collection) as well as crosslinking from the citations of
the end-notes of articles.  OVID is working to expand these full-text
links to other A&I files offered on the system.

What I'd love to see would be even more A&I tools that index Science
offering the link to fulltext.  One that immediately springs to mind is
ISI's Web of Science.  ISI is working with other publishers already.

So consider this an encouragement to the AAAS folks to work with more A&I
publishers to activate these full-text links.

As stated below, this is one added-value feature that I think really has
value for libraries.

Of course, I'll be curious about whether there will be someone out there
that feels strongly that they'd rather get a product without the
inter-linking capabilities if they could pay less.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Kimberly Parker
Electronic Publishing and Collections Librarian
Yale University Library
130 Wall Street              Voice (203) 432-0067
P.O. Box 208240              Fax (203) 432-8527
New Haven, CT  06520-8240    mailto:kimberly.parker@yale.edu
-------------------------------------------------------------

At 09:53 PM 12/8/98 -0500, you wrote:
>I'd like to step up to Science's defense and state that we feel that the
>price for institution-wide access to the electronic version of Science is
>reasonable based on the number of potential users and the added value of
>items such as the links to PubMed, links from the Reference lists,
>Citation Manager, and the PDF versions of the article.
>
>Stephanie Publicker
>Electronic Resources Team Leader
>National Institutes of Health Library
>10 Center Drive, MSC 1150
>Building 10, Room 1L-19
>Bethesda, MD 20892
>Telephone: 301-594-6246   E-mail: publicks@nih.gov  
>Fax: 301-402-0254