The OpCit Project
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ABOUT
the project
PARTNERS
R&D centres and collaborators
PERSONNEL
PAPERS
produced by the project
PRESENTATIONS
at conferences and seminars
RESOURCES
hosted by or accessible through the project
OpCit, The Open Citation Project
Integrating and Navigating Open Eprint Archives through Citation Linking
Fast facts
OpCit is a three year R&D project that officially began in September 1999. The scope of OpCit is described in the project proposal.Funded by: The Joint NSF - JISC International Digital Libraries Research Programme
R&D centres: Southampton University (UK), Cornell University (USA), Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA).
Collaborating partners: NEC, Princeton (USA), University of Ghent (Belgium), Openly Informatics, Inc. (USA), SLAC-SPIRES (USA), Highwire Press (USA), Queen Mary Westfield College, London (UK)
Associated organisations: ACM, BCS
Mission: Scale-Interoperability-Universality
- Scale: to attempt to hyperlink each of the over 100,000 papers in Los Alamos's unique online Physics Archive to every other paper in the archive that it cites
- Interoperability: to develop and integrate a family of generic linking tools and to design author and user interfaces to enable easy adoption by other archives, services and publishers
- Universality: to promote the power of this new way of navigating the scientific journal literature and induce authors in other fields to create interlinked online archives like Los Alamos across disciplines and around the world
Project partnerships: making connections, building linksIt is easy to say what would be the ideal online resource for scholars and scientists: all papers in all fields, systematically interconnected, effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable from any researcher's desk worldwide, for free. In a three-way partnership, Southampton University, Cornell University, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory will examine technology for extablishing citation linkages among scholarly archives. They will prototype this work on a number of scholarly collections, beginning with the over 100,000 papers in Los Alamos's unique arXiv eprint archive. It is hoped that the power of this remarkable new way of navigating the scientific journal literature will help induce authors in others fields to join to create interlinked online archives like Los Alamos across disciplines and around the world. (LANL) Eprint Archive <http://xxx.lanl.gov >, which already contains over half the current physics journal literature and is growing at the rate of 25,000 papers annually, with over 35,000 users daily, and 15 mirror sites around the world. LANL also contains the Computing Research Repository (CoRR), which can be accessed directly through LANL or through the more generalized and integrated interface of the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL) (Davis & Lagoze 1999). LANL (Paul Ginsparg) and CoRR/NCSTRL (Carl Lagoze, Joe Halpern) are partners in this Project, in association with ACM (Association of Computer Machinery; William Arms). The LANL Archive represents a substantial body of literature in Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, but the full texts are archived in a variety of forms, as a database of formats spanning HTML to TeX to PDF to PS; the first problem that needs to be solved is designing a way to integrate and navigate them seamlessly.One especially important feature of full texts -- their reference list -- is arguably the most natural and powerful way of interconnecting and navigating this literature. The "links" are already provided by the authors themselves, and users already have a long, skilled tradition of navigating with them "offline" (looking up the references in paper). In the recently completed, JISC-funded Open Journal and CogPrints Projects, the UK partners (Wendy Hall, Stevan Harnad, Les Carr) have successfully used citation linking to interconnect a small but interdisciplinary "seed" database of full texts in the Cognitive Sciences with a much larger 10-year set of abstracts and their reference lists from a subset of the ISI (Institute for Scientific Information http://www.isinet.com/prodserv/citation/citsci.html ) journal citation database in the Cognitive Sciences (Psychology, Neurobiology, Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy). This work has already gone some way toward solving the problem of automatically recognizing and linking (within and between texts) the finite but noisy set of existing citation formats (Hitchcock et al. 1997a-c, 1998a,b; Giles et al. 1998; Bolacker et al. 1998). The reaction of users was exhilaration with citation-based navigation, but frustration at accessing only abstracts. The obvious conclusion to be drawn was that the real power of citation linking can only be realized with full-text linking. That is what the LANL Archive makes possible. |
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The OpCit project is funded by the Joint NSF - JISC International Digital Libraries Research Programme. |
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