ScientificCommons.org aims to provide the most comprehensive and freely available access to scientific knowledge on the internet.
The major aim of the project is to develop the worlds largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public. A key challenge of the project is to support the rapidly growing number of movements and archives who admit the free distribution and access to scientific knowledge. These are the valuable sources for the ScientificCommons.org project. The ScientificCommons.org project makes it possible to access the largely distributed sources with their vast amount of scientific publications via just one common interface. ScientificCommons.org identifies authors from all archives and makes their social and professional relationships transparent and visible to anyone across disciplinary, institutional and technological boundaries. Currently ScientificCommons.org has indexed about 13 million scientific publications and successfully extracted 6 million authors' names out of this data (January 2007).
Core functions and aims of the project for now and the future are to provide the identification of repositories, the indexing of full-text documents, the extraction of author relationships and personalization services.
Localization of scientific repositories: ScientificCommons.org uses the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to retrieve scientific knowledge data. Repositories who support the OAI-PMH Protocol can add their content to the ScientificCommons.org index by manually adding their OAI URL. For more information please have a look at the Open Access Homepage.
Indexing of metadata and full-text documents: ScientificCommons.org is indexing metadata as well as full-text documents. File formats that will be indexed are PDF, PowerPoint, RTF, Microsoft Word and Postscript with a maximum size of 3MB. We will soon support the Open Document Format as well. The documents are stored at ScientificCommons.org for caching purposes and will be periodically refreshed. ScientificCommons.org wants to provide a download capability regardless of the availability of the original source.
Identification of authors across institutions and archives: ScientificCommons.org identifies authors and attributes them to their scientific publications across various archives. Additionally the social relations between the authors will be extracted and displayed. This makes it easier to understand the research developments and makes them more transparent to the public.
Semantic combination of scientific information: ScientificCommons.org structures and combines the scientific data to knowledge areas using Ontologys. Lexical and statistical methods are used to identify, extract and analyze keywords. Based on this processes ScientificCommons.org classifies the scientific data and uses it, e.g. for navigational and weighting purposes.
Personalization services: ScientificCommons.org offers the researchers the possibility to learn about new publications via our RSS Feed service. They can customize the RSS Feed to a special discipline or even to personalized list of keywords. Furthermore, ScientificCommons.org will provide an organization service. Every researcher can organize his publication directly on ScientificCommons.org to create his own personal researcher profile.
ScientificCommons.org is a project of the University of St.Gallen (Switzerland) and hosted and developed at the Institute for Media and Communications Management.
If you do have questions dont hesitate to contact us!
The ScientificCommons.org Team