Scirus expands coverage with IR strategy

The free science-specific search engine from Elsevier, Scirus, has launched a new initiative to support a select group of institutional repositories. The company has announced that the University of Toronto, a major contributor to the development of its abstracting & indexing service Scopus, will be the first named collaborator in the scheme.

The move continues Scirus' steady expansion of its coverage, which has grown in the past year to include 15 million patents from US, European, Japanese and global patent registering bodies. Last November it also partnered with the American Institute of Physics to index its full-text articles.

The University of Toronto deal covers its T-Space repository, which runs on the Dspace open source software developed by MIT and HP.

Scirus product and marketing manager, Sharon Mombru, told IWR that many academic institutions were focusing on the digitisation and archiving aspects of creating repositories, rather than the discovery side of what's available.

"Either through lack of resources, or different priorities, many institutes are looking for a search mechanism to make their content available and searchable to their target audiences," she said. "Deals like this help us get the Scirus brand out to academic users, and offer the institutions wider dissemination of the work they do."

Mombru said the company was at an advanced stage of developing similar partnerships with "half a dozen other academic institutions", but none of these have been made public. "Our aim is to sign up the top 10 repositories in terms of content and volume".

Since its launch four years ago, Scirus has had to fend off criticisms that it is just a marketing tool to direct online users towards ScienceDirect articles and the use of other Elsevier commercial properties, such as Scopus. Since the announcement of Google Scholar, it is also facing fierce future competition in the free scientific search arena.

But Mombru insisted that Scirus was not an "Elsevier-biased tool". "That is something we want to avoid. Our aim is create the best search mechanism that recognises scientifically valid sites and content. It is important to vet what content is indexed, or else the search process can be worthless."

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