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RSS feedsThomson Scientific is releasing a single tool for searching and accessing online open access content. The Web Citation Index (WCI) from the abstracting and indexing (A&I) specialist will become part of its ISI Web of Knowledge platform and connect together pre-print articles, institutional repositories and open access (OA) journals, IWR can exclusively reveal.
WCI uses the same technology as the Web of Science and provides users with general search and citation search engines, alerts, search history and linking services.
At the heart of WCI is technology that crawls the internet searching for research documents that are freely available. Once the software has located the document it indexes it, locates the citations within the document and automatically links these to the cited document. This technology is the result of a partnership between Thomson and electronics giant NEC, who provided their CiteSeer scientific library system. "We married their technology with the ability to index citations, combining algorithmic and editorial processes," said Jim Pringle, Thomson vp of development, government and academic.
Thomson has formed an editorial team to assess the material being indexed. All content will be judged on a set of criteria that includes; who hosts the archive and is it well maintained, what selection process does the archive have, document formats and whether full text is available.
"The goal is to index all repository material, but it has to conform to scholarly standards," Pringle said, "It brings a consistent resource for pre-prints are difficult to find and brings them into professional research."
Pringle said the OA and institutional repository community needed a serious index and search tool to make their content more "discoverable". Although a shot in the arm for the OA community, Pringle was quick to back traditional publishing models. "Peer review journal literature continues to have an important future; I don't see the repository movement calling that into question. This is part of the process by which repositories are finding their way."
