e - Physical Sciences & Engineering Jeff Pache IEE

The IEE 120,000 Members worldwide Publishes: –17 Research journals –8 Professional magazines –Various conferences in print and on the IEE Digital Library ( 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 publishers e.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 – 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 ( 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.

Contact information Jeff Pache