Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Sunday, June 24, 2007

OA portal and federated search of world science

The US Department of Energy has announced the launch of WorldWideScience.org.  From Friday's press release:

WorldWideScience.org opens public access to more than 200 million pages of international research information....

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the British Library, along with eight other participating countries, today opened an online global gateway to science information from 15 national portals.  The gateway, WorldWideScience.org, gives citizens, researchers and anyone interested in science the capability to search science portals not easily accessible through popular search technology such as that deployed by Google, Yahoo! and many other commercial search engines.

“Scientific research results are archived globally in a plethora of sources, many unknown and unreachable through usual search engines,” Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, DOE Under Secretary for Science, said.  “This international partnership will open up this vast reservoir of knowledge in a rapid and convenient manner, something that will add great value to our existing knowledge.”

Relying on a novel technology called federated search, WorldWideScience.org gives science information consumers a single entry point for searching far-reaching science portals in parallel, with only one query, saving time and effort....Following the model of Science.gov, the U.S. interagency science portal that relies on content published by each participating U.S. agency, WorldWideScience.org will rely on scientific resources published by each participating nation.

The U.S. contribution to WorldWideScience.org is Science.gov, the U.S. government’s one-stop searchable portal to major science databases of federal science agencies. In addition to the U.S. and the U.K., the inaugural WorldWideScience.org portal provides access to research information in English from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands....

PS:  When this project was first announced in January 2007, it was called Science.world.