Scitopia puts beta behind it

Scitopia, the federated search gateway to more than three million science and technology documents spanning 150 years, has been officially launched after a five-month test period.

During the beta, libraries around the world, including the Library of Congress at Stanford University in the US, tested the site.

Eric Pepper, director of publications at partner organisation SPIE, said feedback from researchers and librarians had helped refine the service’s cross-file searching, increasing the precision and consistency of keywords and author searches. “We are confident researchers will find Scitopia.org to be the most direct route to the best science and technological research on the web,” Pepper said.

Scitopia was created by a mainly US group of 13 science and technology society publishers. It offers access to the entire electronic libraries of those publishers, including journal content and conference proceedings dating back to the 19th century.

It also searches a database of nearly 50 million worldwide patents. It offers simple and advanced search options and allows users to mark or email article records for future reference.

“It is exciting to emerge from beta, but we don’t ever expect Scitopia.org to be finished,” said Karen Hawkins of the IEEE, another of the partners. “This is a living project that will continually evolve through enhancements and new technology.”