ScientificCommons

Infobox Non-profit
Non-profit_name = Scientific Commons
Non-profit_
vector_
Non-profit_type = Non-profit organization
founded_date = September 2006
founder = Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, and Beat F. Schmid
location_city = St.Gallen
location_country = Switzerland
location = Institute for Media and Communications Management, University of St. Gallen
origins =
key_people =
area_served =
focus = Building infrastructure for access to scientific publications
method =
revenue =
num_volunteers =
owner =
Non-profit_slogan =
homepage = http://en.scientificcommons.org/
tax_exempt =
dissolved =
footnotes =

ScientificCommons is a project of the University of St. Gallen "Institute for Media and Communications Management". The major aim of the project is to develop the world’s largest archive of scientific knowledge with fulltexts freely accessible to the public.

ScientificCommons includes a search engine for publications and author profiles. It also allows the user to turn searches into customized RSS feeds of new publications [http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/2007/01/19/scientificcommonsorg-access-to-over-13-million-digital-documents/ DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » ScientificCommons.org: Access to Over 13 Million Digital Documents ] ] . ScientificCommons also provides a fulltext caching service for researchers.

Function

ScientificCommons has no registration wall for searchers, but repositories that are not indexed can register by name and the OAI interface URL. It uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to extract data [ [http://en.scientificcommons.org/register-repository Scientific Commons: Register Repository ] ] . Currently, only OAI-compliant repositories and personal websites that are enhanced through Dublin Core in their HTML headers can be included in the index.

ScientificCommons strongly supports self-archiving [http://en.scientificcommons.org/help Scientific Commons: Help ] ] , a legal way for authors to make publications from over 90% of scientific journals available [* [http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving] ] , often called the "green road to open access". The maintainers suggest that scientists should refuse to publish with any journal which will not allow them to self-archive.

Apart from the metadata scraped from repositories, lexical and statistical methods are used to index keywords. Citations are also extracted from the bulk text [ [http://www.lars-kirchhoff.de/go/journal/comments/scientificcommons-starts-citation-analysis/ Lars Kirchhoff [Web Journal - ScientificCommons starts citation analysis ] ] . This data is used in the search engine and RSS feeds.

ScientificCommons has been designed to work with Zotero [ [http://www.lars-kirchhoff.de/go/journal/comments/zotero-and-scientificcommonsorg/ Lars Kirchhoff [Web Journal - Zotero and ScientificCommons.org ] ] .

Because it was made in German-speaking Switzerland, the web interface is also available in German. The majority of the information is in the language of publication, however.

tatistics

As of August 2008, Scientific Commons has:
*21,022,206 Metadata Records
*8,510,882 Authors
*916 repositories

ee also

* Open Archives Initiative
* Dublin Core
* Self-archiving
* Open access publishing

External links

* [http://en.scientificcommons.org/about ScientificCommons home page]
* An example of an author profile ( [http://www.scientificcommons.org/sergey_brin Sergey Brin] )

References