TheScientificWorld An Integrated, Scholarly Knowledge Network<

Citation

McKiernan, G. (2002), "TheScientificWorld An Integrated, Scholarly Knowledge Network<", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919baf.001

TheScientificWorld An Integrated, Scholarly Knowledge Network<

Gerry McKiernan

There is a widespread feeling at present that the current methods of scientific publication are becoming inadequate to meet the needs of scientific communication (Senders et al., 1975, p. ii).

Return to senders

More than a quarter-of-a-century ago, a little known, yet landmark report on scientific publication systems was submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF). Prepared by J.W. Senders, C.M.B. Anderson, and C.D. Hecht of the University of Toronto, the study comprehensively reviewed and analyzed the "past, present and future methods of scientific communication" (Senders et al., 1975). The report contained numerous observations and insights regarding the limitations of paper-based communication among scholars, many made before and since its submission (e.g. Bush, 1945; Lancaster, 1978). Among these were observations that:

. . . [T]he scientific literature is growing exponentially with a doubling time of about 12 years . . . [W]e see no reason for this trend to slow down, let alone reverse, so the inevitable conclusion is that the difficulty of locating and reading articles in the scientific literature is going to increase to the point that the scientific communication . . . may become seriously jeopardised." (Senders et al., 1975, p. 45).

In considering possible solutions to this predicament, Senders and his colleagues identified and described features they believed were essential for an improved and more effective scientific communication medium. Among these were:

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  Low cost. The scientific community is not particularly wealthy, and the cost of obtaining information must be kept as low as possible. Every time a journal raises its price, it loses subscribers.

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  Accessibility (1). The working scientist should be able to become aware of articles relevant to his work without spending a large amount of time or money. Preferably the tools for locating information should be an integral part of the primary information medium.

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  Accessibility (2). Having identified articles of interest, the scientist should be able to have easy, fast access to the full text. He should not have to wait several weeks for it, and would prefer not to have to walk across campus for it.

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  Short lag. Scientists subscribe to journals in order to keep abreast of developments in the field. When they receive a journal, therefore, they should not find that the articles are 12 months or more out of date.

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  High quality. There has been a great deal of complaint lately about the low quality of some articles ­ current estimates are that about 75 percent of articles are more or less worthless. Scientists would prefer not to have to wade through many bad papers in order to find information of real interest. This requirement means that there must be very high standards of refereeing for articles (Senders et al., 1975, pp. 48-9).

In contemplating the structure of a possible alternative system, the team acknowledged:

. . . [the] tendency for individual scientists, faced with a barrage of information, to gradually narrow their interests, so that specializations become more and more specialized. At the same time, of course, [as] the number of specializations increases . . . the literature of science becomes fragmented and increasingly difficult to integrate. When an individual does attempt to integrate different specialties, he finds that he must locate and search a large number of journals (Senders et al., 1975, p. 94).

To address the problems and consequences created by the "fragmentation of the literature", Senders and his colleagues suggest that ". . . the publication system of the future should be centralized . . .", recognizing that "science really forms an indivisible whole" (Senders et al., 1975, p. 93). Given certain characteristics, they suggest that a "centralized system . . . would reduce the severity of . . . literature fragmentation and duplication problems." Among the essential features of their envisioned system is one in which "documents are placed in a common pool," with each user having "unlimited access to the whole pool." From their perspective, "the facility of being able to access the whole pool of articles eliminates the difficulty of locating (or even being aware of) a large number of journals" (Senders et al., 1975, pp. 94-5).

For Senders and his colleagues, a computer-based configuration was clearly "the most effective method of implementing a centralized publication system" . . . (Senders et al., 1975, p. 96). For them, such a platform offered the framework for reconceptualizing the nature of the scientific journal:

There are three groups of functions which should be supported by an electronic journal. Input functions allow authors to prepare a document on the system before passing it (again, through the system) to editors, who in turn can pass it to referees. Journal functions concern the way in which readers can interact with the literature database; non-journal functions include aspects of the scientific communication process which can be conveniently implemented with the electronic journal (Senders et al., 1975, p. 104).

In the third part of their report, Senders et al. provide a detailed description of the primary, secondary, and tertiary features, functionalities, and content of their envisioned "electronic journal". The proposed model incorporates a "straightforward analysis of what users want to do with a journal" as well as a wide range of other observations, insights, and projects, most notably the visions of Bush (1945) and Licklider (1965), among others (Senders et al., 1975, p. 111). When the term "journal" is used in their discussion, it refers to the professional society that would "channel papers into the common pool" (Senders et al., 1975, p. 105). While an increasing number of professional societies provide access to electronic forms of their journals and other publications, few offer the integrated matrix of free and fee-based content and services found within TheScientificWorld, a commercial portal.

TheScientificWorld

[In a computerized central publication system] . . . all of the scientific literature is in one place, so that scientists will know where to find the information they need in their daily work (Senders et al., 1975, p. 97).

Figure 1 Homepage of TheScientificWorld

TheScientificWorld (www.thescientificworld.com/) is an integrated scholarly Web portal to services, resources, and products intended to enhance and accelerate the research efforts of science professionals (see Figure 1). Within its dynamic and interlinked system, individuals are able to:

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  access a free bibliographic database;

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  retrieve the full-text of indexed publications;

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  search or browse an integrated multidisciplinary electronic journal;

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  electronically prepare, submit, and publish a peer-reviewed paper;

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  request personalized e-mail alerts to the latest scientific and clinical research findings, news, and funding opportunities;

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  search, browse and locate the most modern methods and protocols in the life sciences;

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  search or browse forthcoming meetings;

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  prepare, submit and review funding proposal applications online;

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  procure equipment, supplies or biological materials online; and

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  access major Web references, resources and tools.

TheScientificWorld JOURNAL

. . . [T]he electronic journal has several features intrinsic to the computer medium which make it very suitable for a scientific communication system (Senders et al., 1975, p. 101).

Among its numerous offerings, the TheScientificWorld publishes The ScientificWorldJOURNAL (www.thescientificworld.com/publications/), "a single unified environment for the publication of all high-quality science", drawn from several dozen scientific disciplines within the life, biomedical and environmental sciences. The journal is an electronic-only Web e-journal, with an "editorial concept and structure designed to capture the benefits of the Internet," unhampered by the inherent limitations of paper:

Instead of adding to the heterogeneous collection of journals, TheScientific World is developing a matrix of integrated domains with shared ­ or transparent ­ content. The Matrix of Domains is an orderly array of information organized by system (e.g. Neuroscience, Immunology, Cardiology, Endocrinology, etc.), process (e.g. development, aging, cancer, disease, etc.) or approach and methodology (e.g. biochemistry, pharmacology, molecular biology, genetics and genomics, proteomics, cell biology, cellular networks, imaging, etc.).

TheScientificWorldJOURNAL accommodates original research reports and short communications, critical and summary reviews, methods and protocols, as well as commentaries, columns, professional society news, book and Web site reviews, and letters. As has become standard within many professional and commercial electronic journals, TheScientificWorldJOURNAL requires online submission and allows authors to exploit more fully the digital publication environment by encouraging them to include multimedia content with their contributions. TheScientific World is committed to maintaining an archival version of its journal and guarantees that a dated original version of its content will be available for priority and associated claims.

Papers submitted to TheScientific WorldJOURNAL are peer-reviewed. Prominent principal and associate editors and editorial boards oversee the review of submissions for quality and topicality, with leading scientists serving as referees.

As the journal does not have a predetermined publication schedule, contributions are published immediately after acceptance. Unlike conventional publishing agreements, contributors retain copyright ownership to their TheScientific WorldJOURNAL publications. With the journal homepage, readers may:

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  display a citation list of published content in reverse chronological order, each with a corresponding abstract and link to a sciBASE bibliographic record (see below);

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  browse the citations and abstracts of forthcoming publications;

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  retrieve sample publications (review, mini-review, research article, commentary, Directions in Science, editorial, letter);

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  review a list of forthcoming commissioned review and mini-review articles, with their provisional articles, titles, and authors; and

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  display and read the full-text of papers in the journal's Directions in Science series, a collection of brief articles that explain the published results of recent noteworthy papers, their relation to historical work in the field, the implications of the current results for a discipline and the world at large.

From within its search form, The ScientificWorldJOURNAL can be searched, without charge, by free-text ("All"), title keyword ("Title"), author keyword ("Author") and/or Digital Object Identifier (DOI^®). The DOI^® is "a system for identifying and exchanging intellectual property in the digital environment" (International DOI Foundation, 2001) and is the emerging standard for citation and retrieval on the Web. Terms and phrases may be combined in a Boolean statement using common operators (AND, OR, NOT) and left, right, and internal truncation are available for author names, as well as terms, using a standard symbol ("*"). Readers may also perform a "Quick Search" using this search option location in the upper left-hand corner of the search page. Within the display of the bibliographic record and abstract for a selected entry retrieved from a primary search, title keywords as well as author names are hotlinked and provide an indirect, yet powerful method of searching the journal.

While much of the full-text content of TheScientificWorldJOURNAL is available free-of-charge, a significant portion is available on a pay-per-view or site license basis. Pay-per-view costs vary from $6 to $12 per article, payable with a major credit card or by deposit account.

TheScientificWorldJOURNAL is currently indexed in Biological Abstracts and BIOSIS Previews, Chemical Abstracts, Aquatic Sciences & Fisheries Abstracts as well as in sciBASE, TheScientificWorld bibliographic database (see below).

i-Publish

In principle, there is no reason to have lags of more than one month with an electronic journal. This estimate is based upon the idea . . . that authors can prepare their text online and that editors can pass documents to reviewers over the same network (Senders et al., 1975, p. 101).

i-Publish (http://www.thescientificworld.com/iPublish) is TheScientific World's publishing service for its journal as well as conference abstracts and proceedings, and other documents. For the journal, i-Publish offers authors a variety of benefits, including:

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  free submission;

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  no page charges;

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  inclusion of multimedia components (audio, video, animation, and/or 3-D graphics);

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  no charges for use of color, animation, audio, or video;

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  Web-based manuscript submission and peer review;

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  no limit on the length of manuscripts;

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  listings of datasets and available models within papers to promote interconnectivity between scientific literature and tools;

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  rapid publication (accepted manuscripts are published usually within one-to-five days after acceptance);

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  publication in HTML and PDF format; and

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  ability to continually update a manuscript before and after publication to provide the very latest results; and

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  author retention of copyright.

All contributions to TheScientific WorldJOURNAL are required to be submitted electronically using i-Publish and can be sent to the editor of the author's choice. In turn, the editor will distribute the submission electronically to referees and to other editors, if necessary. Manuscripts must be submitted electronically in Word for Windows or Macintosh, WordPerfect, or Rich Text Format (RTF), and illustrations and images provided in one of four common formats: .gif, .jpg, .tif, and .bmp. Contributions with a large number of images or images that are too large for the screen constraints must be linked from the contribution to the author's Web site. Likewise, submissions with audio, video, 3-D, animation or other multimedia content must also be linked to the author's site.

sciBASE

[One of the] primary uses of a journal ... [is] retrospective searching ... (Senders et al., 1975, p. 111) ... [W]henever a title looks of interest ... [the scholar] should be able ... to look at its abstract or full text. He should be able to perform this browsing either on the entire database at once or on the indices of one or more specified "journals" (Senders et al., 1975, p. 113).

sciBASE (www.thescientificworld.com/scibase/) is a free online bibliographic and abstract database of more than 30 million records drawn from over 30,000 scientific journals and more than 10,000 published conference proceedings dating from 1965. sciBASE content is derived from databases created by the National Library of Medicine (MEDLINE^®), the British Library, and INIST-CRNS (PASCAL), as well as CABI Publishing (CAB Abstracts^®) for the TheScientificWorld alerting service (see below). A downloadable list of journals covered by sciBASE is available in zipped Microsoft Excel format.

Searches can be conducted directly from the sciBASE search page or by using the "Quick Search" feature found in the upper left-hand corner of the The ScientificWorld home page (see Figure 2). From within the main sciBASE search page, users may perform a keyword search ("Word Search"), author search, or journal title search, for all available years (1965-present), and limit the results to a specific year (e.g. 2001) using a drop-down menu. As with a search in TheScientificWorld JOURNAL, terms and phrases may be combined in a Boolean statement using common operators (AND, OR, NOT), and left, right, and internal truncation are available for author names, as well as terms, using a standard symbol ("*"). To ensure comprehensive retrieval searching by journal title, users should consider all possible variant forms. The complete journal list can be consulted to view the journal names as represented by various data providers.

sciBASE may also be searched by using stored search strategies created using a Personal User Profile (PuP) feature (see below).

Figure 2 sciBASE search page

sciBASE allows users not only to identify relevant citations, but to retrieve their associated full-text as well. Most full-text articles are provided on a pay-per-view basis and can be purchased using a major credit card or a draw-down deposit account, with Web delivery or direct e-mail of purchased articles. sciBASE features immediate digital delivery of full-text articles from over 500 journals produced by such participating publishers as Blackwell Science, Taylor & Francis, IOS Press, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), Karger, and Mary Ann Liebert, as well as "copyright cleared" document delivery service for other items. Other content sources are expected to be available in the near future.

Depending on the provider, electronic delivery is provided as an immediate download in PDF file format; other documents are delivered electronically within 24-48 hours in the Ariel TIFF file format as an e-mail attachment ("Standard"), with rush delivery (two-to-four-hour processing) available for an additional $3.00 charge. A list of the journals from which articles can be delivered immediately in PDF format is available in zipped Microsoft Excel file. Fax is a general delivery alternative to Standard electronic delivery and is available for an additional cost ($3.00). While most articles are available electronically, a few publishers prohibit the electronic delivery of their articles or allow only fax delivery. In these cases, the requester is notified that the requested article is not available or that it is only available by fax.

The cost of an article varies by publisher and copyright holder. All articles are copyright cleared and requesters are charged an associated copyright fee in addition to an article delivery fee (e.g. "Article fee: $12.00; Copyright fee: $7.25 or the copyright charge is included in the fees quoted for immediate PDF delivery" (e.g. "Article fee of $17.00 includes copyright fee"). While one does not have to be a subscriber to a journal to order a copy of an article in that journal, the user must formally register a Personal User Profile (PuP) with TheScientificWorld before orders can be placed (see below). A component of PuP, pupALERT, enables users to receive automatic daily or weekly e-mail notification of additions to sciBASE, as well as TheScientificWorld JOURNAL and worldMEET (see below).

worldMEET

The network could also be used to publicise things like . . . meetings and conferences . . . (Senders et al., 1975, p. 121).

worldMEET (www.thescientificworld.com/worldMeet/) is a comprehensive and extensive searchable database of approximately 5,000 forthcoming and recent scientific conferences held world-wide. It also covers symposia, workshops, and business and science events. worldMEET can be searched by title keyword, organization name keyword, author keyword, subject ("classification"), date or date range, location, or exhibitor name, or sponsor name (see Figure 3). In addition to an event summary, a detailed program, contact information, and other data, the worldMEET record includes a link to the event home page, when available. Conference organizers of such meetings are encouraged to publish the event abstracts, extended abstracts, and/or the full or selected proceedings through i-Publish, The ScientificWorld's publishing system.

Figure 3 Search page for worldMEET showing select subject categories ("classifications")

Individuals can receive e-mail alerts to upcoming relevant scientific and business meetings through pupALERT, TheScientificWorld Personal User Profile (PuP) alerting service.

methodsBASE

In general, it seems that the basic medium of the electronic journal ­ the distributed computer network ­ lends itself quite readily to a variety of functions which are not directly concerned with the scientific literature database (Senders et al., 1975, p. 121).

methodsBASE (www.thescientificworld.com/methodsbase/mb_displaybasicsearch.asp) is a specialized database of life science laboratory methods and protocols that uses a database compiled by Biosis. Users can search more than 175,000 classified and indexed records selected from scientific journals, books, conference proceedings, patents, and Web sites. Users can perform a keyword search in all fields, or limit it to one of several specific fields, namely:

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  Title, Abstract, Indexing.

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  Title or Abstract.

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  Title Only.

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  Source Title.

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  Methods and Equipment.

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  Chemicals and Biochemicals.

Keywords may be combined using standard Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and searches may be limited by year(s), full-text availability, or to patents. methodsBASE may also be searched by author keyword search and similarly limited. The database may also be browsed and records sorted by methodological approach or bioscience discipline. A "Quick Search" feature is also available in the upper left-hand corner of the methodsBASE page.

methodsBASE is integrated with sciBASE, the citation and abstract database, thus enabling users to locate, verify, purchase and receive online the full-text articles in which particular method or protocol is described. In addition, its records contain links to labSHELF (see below), TheScientificWorld supplier catalog service and gateway, thereby facilitating the procurement of referenced laboratory resources. methodsBASE is also integrated into the Personal User Profile (PuP) e-mail alerting service, enabling researchers to receive current news and research findings on personalized topics of interest (see below). In addition, methodsBASE also provides links to news stories and allows users to submit protocols for publication through the i-Publish service.

methodsBASE was co-developed with BIOSIS (biosis.org) and is currently available only by subscription.

labSHELF

Advertising would also be possible for equipment . . . [and] . . . there could be a separate advertising file for each class of product, and users could search these in much the same way that they would search any other file (Senders et al., 1975, p. 121).

labSHELF is TheScientificWorld gateway to supplier online catalogs; currently, only the online catalog of Fisher Scientific (fishersci.com) is available. Fisher Scientific is a leading manufacturer and distributor of scientific research, health care, safety, industrial, and maintenance, repair, and operating (MRO) educational products and services.

referenceSHELF

In addition to the functions which the system must serve as an electronic journal, there are some functions which become feasible on a computer network, and which would improve scientific communication generally (Senders et al., 1975, p. 120).

referenceSHELF (www.thescientificworld.com/refShelf/refshelf.asp) is a collection of select Web-based reference resources of potential interest to members of the scientific community. It presently provides access to an abbreviations and acronyms database of societies and organizations, a link to a glossary of terms related to science, and a directory of professional societies.

Abbreviations & Acronyms

Abbreviations & Acronyms(www.thescientificworld.com/refShelf/refshelf_abbreacron.asp) is a database of abbreviations of various organizations and scientific societies world-wide that can be browsed or searched.

Glossary

The Glossary(www.thescientificworld.com/refShelf/refshelf_glossary.asp) is a database of scientific definitions related to science that may be searched or browsed.

Jean's Links

Jean's Links (www.thescientificworld.com/refShelf/refshelf_links.asp) is a browsable and searchable database of scientific societies and organizations. For each entry, brief general and historical information is provided, as are contacts, and a link to the organization's home page. In addition, the associated country and language(s) are noted.

Personal User Profile (PuP)

The reader should be able to log on to the system, and then request a current awareness browse of several types. He could ask the system to show him the authors and titles of articles which match a search profile kept in his personal workspace and have been published since his last browse (Senders et al., 1975, p. 113).

The Personal User Profile (PuP) (http://www.thescientificworld.com/pup/login.asp) is the personalization function within TheScientificWorld. By completing a PuP, a user can:

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  search TheScientificWorld research and event databases based on personalized search criteria;

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  receive personalized e-mail notification (pupALERTS) of new articles, research, and upcoming events in specified areas of interest;

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  receive personalized daily news and other community information; and

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  learn about new procedures, methods and protocols, and other resources.

Alerts cover all new sciBASE entries and worldMEET events that match an individual's personalized search criteria. A maximum of three different search criteria may be stored and can consist of keywords, author names, and/or journal names, and are limited to no more than 100 items in any one e-mail alert. pupALERTs search all the current content providers contributing to sciBASE, including new records, CAB Abstracts® records, and new articles added to TheScientificWorld JOURNAL.

A PuP can be updated at any time by clicking on a "Train my PuP" link. Personal information within a PuP is not provided to any outside sources without the user's permission.

ScienceWise™

The network could also be used to publicise things like requests for proposals . .. various forms of news, and so on ... Advertising would also be possible for . . . positions vacant . . . (Senders et al., 1975, p. 121).

ScienceWise™ (content.sciencewise.com) is a division of TheScientific World that "offers science professionals an integrated suite of products and services designed to enhance and accelerate their research." Based in Maryland, the ScienceWise™ mission is to "help science professionals reduce the time spent searching for information, increase revenues through funding and teaming opportunities, enhance collaboration with colleagues, stay current in their areas of expertise, and increase overall productivity." Among its many components, ScienceWise™ offers an online searchable database of funding opportunities, a funding ALERT service, and individually customized Web pages for grant funding information (see Figure 4). In addition, ScienceWise™ developed and provides access to Minority Online Information System (MOLIS), an online database, catalog, and directory of minority institutions and minority faculty.

Figure 4 Homepage of ScienceWise™ a division of TheScientificWorld

fundingALERT

The fundingALERT service offers access to a variety of funding sources, information, and organizations, including:

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  over 10,000 funding opportunities;

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  online publications such as the NIH Guide, Federal Register, NSF Bulletin;

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  160 federal, state and local government agencies;

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  700 US foundations and other non-profit organizations;

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  300 R&D corporations.

Subscribers to fundingALERT can receive daily e-mail notification of relevant program announcements, Request for Proposals (RFPs), solicitations, and grant programs, that match a user interest profile. Through service, more than 140,000 subscribers receive over 2 million e-mails each month based on a customized profile. FundingALERT sources also include funding opportunities for small businesses, including federal funding for Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR). The fundingALERT service is a paid content delivery and search service. To view the full-text of funding content, an individual must be an active subscriber.

fundingSEARCH

fundingSEARCH is an umbrella service that provides access to several specialized databases that include funding information:

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  Research and Education Funding (federal agencies, corporations, foundations, and the European Union. Also includes small business and on-going program opportunities).

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  MOLIS (funding programs designed for minority institutions as well as directory information for research facilities, centers, and faculty at minority institutions) (see below).

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  FEDIX (Selected federal agency funding sources: AFOSR, DoD, DOT, NASA, NIH, USAID, and USDA).

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  Science and Engineering Scholarships.

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  Science and Engineering Jobs.

formsCENTRAL

In addition to providing access to a variety of funding search services, ScienceWise™ offers access to the application forms of various of government, corporate, non-profit, and international funding organizations (forms- CENTRAL) enabling researchers to electronically submit proposals directly to the funding agency. Among the federal departments and agencies for which electronic forms are provided through formsCENTRAL are:

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  Department of Agriculture.

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  Department of Commerce.

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  Department of Education.

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  Department of the Interior.

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  Department of Transportation.

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  Environmental Protection Agency.

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  Food and Drug Administration.

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  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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  Patent and Trade Mark Office.

proposalCENTRAL

proposalCENTRAL is a Web-based proposal management application system that enables Web-based submission and review of grant proposals. From within proposalCENTRAL, grant-seekers can identify funding opportunities by searching through specific announcements and forms, browse through opportunity lists from non-profit and corporate funding sponsors, or submit proposals directly to participating sponsors and granting agencies. To date, more than 3,500 proposals and about 6,000 peer reviews online have been processed. Users of the system include the Alzheimer's Association, the American Cancer Society, the Arthritis Foundation, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). ProposalCENTRAL was formerly known as "Foundation Commons".

SciJobs

Scijobs.org is the largest Internet source of biology, chemistry, biotechnology, and other science jobs. It offers five components:

1. 1.

   job search (Search for Jobs);

2. 2.

   employer browse (Browse Employers);

3. 3.

   résumé submission (Submit Your Résumé);

4. 4.

   registration (Register); and

5. 5.

   employer recommendation (Recommend a Company).

MOLIS

MOLIS, the Minority On-Line Information Service, is an online database of over 260 minority institutions used by government agencies, the private sector, and other organizations and institutions to develop partnerships with minority institutions. MOLIS is a centralized source of in-depth information about the research and educational capabilities of participating Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and Minority Postsecondary Institutions (MPIs). In addition, MOLIS is also used by government agencies to identify possible faculty at minority institutions to serve as peer reviewers.

MOLIS provides information on a minority institutions' research centers, research interests and capabilities, facilities, equipment, faculty profiles, statistics on the number of degrees awarded, enrollment figures, scholarship and fellowship information, and other related data.

Collaboratory

Among the most innovative of the features and content in TheScientific World and ScienceWise™ are services and resources relating to the collaboratory. A collaboratory is a neologism created by combining the words "collaboration" and "laboratory" (National Research Council. Committee on a National Collaboratory: Establishing the User-Developer Partnership, 1993). Coined by William Wulf, then an assistant director for a division of the US National Science Foundation, a collaboratory has been defined as:

. . . a center without walls, in which the nation's researchers can perform their research without regard to geographical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries (Gold, 1999).

Within ScienceWise™, the collaboratory is "a secure, user-configurable, virtual project space." Created to foster inter-organizational teamwork, the ScienceWise™ collaboratory contains a variety of "tools and services for research and development projects that span organizations, geographic regions, and time zones" and provides: communication tools for distributed research teams, storage facilities for project data and documents, and an extensive scientific reference library.

From the Collaboratory page within ScienceWise™, access is provided to:

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  The Science Media Collaboratory: Conversations in Science. An interactive, virtual pressroom where scientists and the media can explore current science issues.

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  Tools for Collaboration. A Web page with link to choose more than half a dozen collaboratory resources and environments that enable online conferencing, the design and distribution of scientific products, document sharing, electronic manuscripts submission, review, and publication.

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  Examples of Collaboratories in Science. A Web page with description and links to a variety of collaborative activities. Notable entries include Collaboratory for Microscopic Digital Anatomy (CMDA); DeepView, a collaboratory that is exploring "the current trend in telepresence research"; and NEESgrid, a national virtual laboratory for earthquake engineering.

Resources

Complementing the variety of services found with ScienceWise™ is a diverse collection of selected commercial and non-commercial Web Resources. Among these are:

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  The Grants Keyword Thesaurus™.The Grants Keyword Thesaurus™ is a controlled vocabulary used to consistently describe grant and funding publications and documents used by participating federal agencies, the NIH Guide, and the NSF Bulletin, and is the government standard for identifying research and educational opportunities. Upon registration, the thesaurus can be downloaded at no cost by colleges, universities, hospitals, and other non-profit research institutions, for internal purposes only. The eighth edition contains more than 3,000 terms and phrases.

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  SciFor Inc. SciFor Inc. specializes in the preparation of scientific posters as well black-and-white and color hand-outs.

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  Business Directory & Buyer's Guide. The Business Directory & Buyer's Guide is a "comprehensive online manufacturer, distributor, product, and service resource source available in the scientific and engineering community." Entries may be browsed by "Field/Discipline", "Specialty" or "Company Name".

• •

  Small BusinessResources. Small Business is a ScienceWise™ Web page that lists and links to a variety of resources, documents, and governmental programs for the small businessperson.

• •

  NetWise: A Collection of Online Resources for Scientists and Engineers. NetWise is an extensive compendium of select science and engineering Web resources organized by broad category and alphabetically.

newsLAB

The network could also be used to publicise things like . . . various forms of news (Senders et al., 1975, p. 121).

newsLAB provides news, commentaries, and featured articles and editorials from leading scientists and business professionals about science, as well as "updates from industry, academe and government." Free access is provided to the entire newsLAB collection and to news in several broad subjects and categories (e.g. "Life Sciences", "Opinions & Editorial", "Features") from TheScientificWorld home page. Registered users may create a personalized news page ("myNews") of scientific, business and world events by selecting from more than 200 categories and subcategories (Tomlinson, 2000, p. 2) within the Personal User Profile service.

Future developments

TheScientificWorld is developing a user-defined competitive intelligence alerting service that will provide the latest scientific research publications, scientific meetings, news, and a facility to research funding opportunities relevant to a member's specific fields of interest. Various levels of services ­ ranging from a free basic service to a premium pay service ­ will be offered. In addition, there are plans to integrate large datasets with single articles to create specialized ScienceWorlds, where information is dynamically presented according to the specific scientific interests of a participating scientist (Tomlinson, 2000, p. 1).

TheScientificWorldJOURNAL plans to continue to adopt initiatives that promote international interoperability standards such as DOI^®, CrossRef, XML, the Dublin Core, and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). In addition, TheScientificWorldJOURNALarticles will be available free of charge through public online libraries by TheScientific World after 12 months; currently articles are offered free of charge if publication fees are paid by authors or sponsors.

"A whole new world"

With its launch in September 2000, TheScientificWorld realized and implemented the vision of countless scientists, information specialists, and librarians world-wide, who have long sought an integrated and dynamic system for facilitating and enhancing professional communication among scholars. With one of the most innovative electronic frameworks currently available, one can expect that TheScientificWorld no doubt will soon offer other novel components that actualize the foresight of Senders et al. and their predecessors and successors. While highly speculative, one can envision that some of the following features, functionalities, and content will be provided within the The ScientificWorld in the not too distant future:

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  . . . [U]sers should have a private workspace . . . [to] use . . . as a filing system, or an appointments pad or scratchpad for storing notes . . . (Senders et al., 1975, p. 140).

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  [M]essage sending could . . . be used for all the functions served by invisible colleges. [As] more than two users could be connected together, ... computer conferencing would be possible ... Since they are a useful form of long-distance communication, it obviously makes sense to incorporate a conferencing system into the electronic journal, since the telecommunications network and terminal availability is already present (Senders et al., 1975, pp. 120-1).

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  The user should also have the ability to store copies of documents in his personal workspace, so that he can refer to them at a later date. (Senders et al., 1975, p. 119).

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  . . . [T]he ability to search by reference. This means that the user gives the system the citation for one paper . . . and asks for a list of all the subsequent articles which refer to it ... Searching by reference could also work the other way, in that the reader could ask for a network of papers derived from the reference list of each article. Given a starting paper, the system would retrieve all of the articles cited there, look at their reference lists and retrieve those articles, and so on (Senders et al., 1975. pp. 114-15).

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  Up to this point, we have only considered the reader as a receiver of information. It is possible, however, for information to flow the other way, from the reader to the journal. In the same way that we suggested that reviewing a paper could be done through a form of Delphi conferencing, the journal could allow readers to enter comments about an article and then make the comments part of the permanent record, attached to the article. The comments would not be searchable, but could be retrieved with the full text of the article (Senders et al., 1975, p. 118).

With the adoption of advanced markup languages that provide structured access to Web documents (e.g. XML) (World Wide Web Consortium, 2001) and associated harvesting and presentation technologies (e.g. self-organizing maps (SOM)) (Kohonen, 2001), one might also expect TheScientificWorld to offer conceptual browsing of the "knowledge spaces" of its content:

Perhaps it is worth emphasizing at this point that the electronic journal as we have described it is a system for storing and retrieving documents, and not facts or concepts. This document orientation places certain constraints on the way the database is organized. For example, it has been suggested that large-scale information retrieval systems could have databases structured in terms of some kind of n-dimensional "knowledge space". Each dimension in a knowledge space by a vector describing the degree to which that datum is related to each of the dimensions . . . (Senders et al., 1975, pp. 137-8).

TheScientificWorld is among an increasing number of "eclectic journals" that provide and integrate a wide variety of digital resources and services within their framework (McKiernan, 2001; in press). In view of its success in its brief history, one can predict that in the near future TheScientificWorld will be among the few to fully exemplify and symbolize the scientific publication system envisioned by Senders and his colleagues a generation ago.

Organization

TheScientificWorld was founded by Jeffrey G. Hillier, PhD, the company's President of Information Services, and formerly Senior Vice President of CRC Press and Managing Director of Elsevier Biomedical Press; and Eric Tomlinson, PhD, DSc, its Chief Executive Officer, and formerly CEO and President of GeneMedicine, Inc., a publicly-traded gene therapy company, and Worldwide Head, Advanced Drug Delivery Research, Ciba-Geigy Pharmaceuticals.

TheScientificWorld has a standing Scientific Advisory Board that provides advice on science and directions in scientific information.

TheScientificWorld partners include Albertina Icome Praha s.r.o., Alchematrix, CatchWord, Dalicon, Fisher Scientific, INTIQUA International, LION Bioscience; content providers include BIOSIS^®, Blackwell Science/Munksgaard, The British Library, CABI Publishing, Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique (INIST) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) (France), IOS Press, International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), Karger, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., National Library of Medicine (MEDLINE^®), NewsEdge, Institute for Scientific Information (The Scientist), and Taylor & Francis.

Technical

TheScientificWorld site is best viewed with Internet Explorer 5.5.

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank Jeffrey G. Hillier, PhD, President, Information Services, TheScientificWorld, for permission to reproduce selected screen prints from TheScientificWorld.

Gerry McKiernan(gerrymck@iastate.edu) is a Science and Technology Librarian and Bibliographer, Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa, USA.