Thomson Scientific Joins With ProQuest to Create Wider Audience for Open-Access Scholarly Research
Philadelphia, PA, USA - London, UK - January 19, 2006 - Today, two key information solutions providers involved in enabling the open-access
movement announced an initiative that will provide greater access to institutionally
created research. The Thomson Scientific Web Citation Index™ will
index ProQuest’s Digital Commons open access material. This new initiative
means Digital Commons-hosted work will be more broadly discoverable.
“ISI Web of KnowledgeSM has long been acknowledged
as the de facto standard for creating search and discovery pathways to scholarly
content,” said Suzanne BeDell, ProQuest Vice President of Publishing.
“This new product by Thomson Scientific is a perfect vehicle to expose
to the widest possible audience the Open Access content that institutions place
in their Digital Commons repositories.”
“ProQuest has created a unique service offering for institutional repositories,”
said James Pringle, Vice President of Development, Thomson Scientific. “We
are very pleased to be working with ProQuest, given the number of scholarly
institutions that have chosen Digital Commons since its introduction last year.
The Web Citation Index already includes repositories based on a variety of platforms.
Adding significant content from ProQuest’s service will make it even easier
for users around the world to discover pathways to material that includes preprints,
post-prints, technical reports, dissertations, proceedings, and other gray literature.”
ProQuest’s Digital Commons is an OAI-compliant digital institutional
repository service powered by technology supplied by The Berkeley Electronic
Press. Digital Commons maximizes the visibility and availability of scholarship
at a significantly lower cost than open-source alternatives. The alliance between
Digital Commons and Web Citation Index creates a central point of access
for finding the most up-to-date and relevant research available.
Web Citation Index is the multidisciplinary citation index of scholarly
content from institutional and subject-based repositories. Web Citation
Index transcends the capabilities of traditional Web search engines, providing
users with a robust citation-based discovery vehicle for content hosted on institutional
repositories. Thomson Scientific content editors select only those Web repositories
deemed scholarly. This ensures Web Citation Index delivers only the
highest-quality, most-relevant content.
About ProQuest Information and Learning
ProQuest Information and Learning, a division of ProQuest Company, is a world
leader in collecting, organizing, and publishing information worldwide for researchers,
faculty, and students in libraries and schools. Known widely for its strength
in business and economics, general reference, humanities, social sciences, and
STM content, the company develops premium databases comprising periodicals,
newspapers, dissertations, out-of-print books, and other scholarly information
from more than 8,500 publishers worldwide. Users access the information through
the ProQuest® Web-based online information system, Chadwyck-Healey™
electronic and microform resources, UMI® microform and print reference products,
eLibrary®, SIRS® and Voyager Expanded Learning educational resources.
For more information about ProQuest Information and Learning, visit www.il.proquest.com.
