Societies offer supersearch

Society publishers unite to offer aggregated search service

A group of 13 science and technology society publishers is offering a “free” aggregated search service across all their resources.

The federated search gateway, Scitopia, was developed in three months and will provide access to three million documents, including peer-reviewed journal content and conference proceedings spanning 150 years of science and technology.

The collaboration of the 13 mainly US societies will go live in May.

“It will be a perpetual beta,” said Terry Hulbert, of the UK’s Institute of Physics, which is part of the group. “Features and functionality are planned but we can’t do it all at the beginning so we will be rapidly adding it in.

“We are trying to differentiate from other services by making the noise-to-signal ratio better,” he said of major services such as Scopus and ISI. “The top titles by impact factor are published by learned societies.”

Scitopia plans to add clustering, tagging and aggregated RSS.