The EPrint Linking Project

"Bringing the academic literature alive on the World Wide Web"

Fast facts

The EPrint Linking project officially starts in September 1999.
Finding out about it: The scope of EPrint linking is described in the project proposal.
What was it? An R&D project
Funded by: The International Digital Libraries Research Program of the National Science Foundation (USA) and the Electronic Libraries (eLib) programme of the Joint Information Systems Committee (UK).
Start date: September 1999 End date (funded phase): August 2002
R&D centres: Southampton University (UK), Cornell University (USA), Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA).
Other partners:
Mission statement: To build a coherently interlinked version of the LANL preprint archive, based on citation linking technology derived from the Open Journal ELiB project and other sources.
Deliverables:
Keywords: electronic journals, digital libraries, citation linking

Aim

It 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 3-way partnership, Southampton University, Cornell University, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory will 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. 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.

Academic Publishing and Links

(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.

This page http://links.eprints.org/

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The EPrint Linking project is jointly funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as part of its Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme and by the National Science Foundation, as part of its International Digital Libraries programme.

TRY THE LINKED ARCHIVE

MORE INFORMATION?
Contact Steve Hitchcock our Project Manager

OR CONTACT US AT:

Citation Links Project,
Department of Electronics
& Computer Science,
University of Southampton,
Highfield,
Southampton
SO17 1BJ, UK
Tel: (01703) 594479
Fax: (01703) 592865