e - physical sciences & engineering jeff pache iee
TRANSCRIPT
The IEE
• 120,000 Members worldwide
• Publishes:– 17 Research journals– 8 Professional magazines – Various conferencesin print and on the IEE Digital Library (
www.ieedl.org)
• Produces the Inspec Database
The Inspec Database
• A secondary or A&I database in the fields of Physics, Engineering and Computing
• ~10 million references from 1898 to present
• 1 – 2 million links to electronic full text articles
Information needs
• Simple facts: Who, what, where, when?From: Colleagues, search engines and A&I services
• Research results / technical solutions From: Peer-reviewed literature
Information needs to be:
• Discoverable [and re-discoverable]
• Accessible
• Authoritative, of known quality
• Complete
• Navigable
• Linked to other relevant information
• Readable
Discovery – Search
• Searched data need to be comprehensive
• Results need to be relevant• Result sets need to be refinable• Search needs to handle more than just
simple alphanumerics• Fielded searching is important• It’s finding not searching that matters
Discovery – Browsing
• A&I current awareness services
• Tables of Contents (TOCs)
• TOC alerts
• RSS feeds from publisherse.g. Nature
Access
• Sometimes the results list or abstract reveals what’s needed, but
• Moving easily from search results to the full text is important
Authoritive
• Peer reviewed articles
• Journal brand is a quality stamp
• Journals with high rejection rates and high impact factors
Complete – Supplementary material
• Published with article in all versions, whether text, data or audiovisual clips
• Included in the peer review process
• Archived as part of the record of science
Navigation & Linking
• Publisher based initiatives:– Digital Object Identifier – DOI– Reference linking using DOIs
CrossRef – www.crossref.org
• Other initiatives– SFX– Open URL
Readability
Stix Fonts project:• Preparation of a comprehensive set of
fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats (www.stixfonts.org)
• Participants: AIP, ACS, AMS, IEEE, APS, Elsevier
What else
• What else do can you / could you do with published articles?
• What else do you want to do with published articles?
Satisfying the “What ifs”
• What happens if I plug my data into this author’s equations or analysis methods?
• What if I put this author’s data into another set of equations or analyse them in a different way?
Bringing the article and its content to life
• Make the equations active objects
• Make the data, data sets and graphs usable electronically
What about other data the author has used?
• Not all data the author uses will or can be published with the article
• Can we still link to it?
• Can we be sure it’s the same as when the author used it?
• Can we build on the author’s work by going further with the same data?
Large data repositories
Examples:
• Particle accelerator data
• Radio astronomy data
• Satellite imaging
Standards
Scope for further standards work?
• Formats of supplementary material
• Publisher handling this material
• Links to external data sets
• Specification of data sets
Summary
Lets enable the scientist or engineer to:
• Not just search for the relevant information but find it
• Not just link to and from articles but navigate around article space
• Not just read the information but use it• Not just appreciate the contribution but
build on it
Final thought
In 1675, Isaac Newton said:
“If I have seen further it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”
Final thought
One role of electronic publishers should be to provide the electronic step-ladder for researchers to more easily climb on to the shoulders of giants and build on their work.
