[open-bibliography] Message from the Scitopia partner societies

Fri Nov 4 21:06:07 UTC 2011

  T.Schoch at ieee.org writes

> Following is a response to recent postings regarding the Scitopia 
> federated search tool. The Scitopia society partners had planned to 
> release a formal announcement about the future of the service in the next 
> few days but thought it important to move the timing up to explain what is 
> happening and dispel any misunderstandings. 
> 
> The Scitopia partners regret to announce that the Scitopia free federated 
> search portal will be discontinued after 31 December 2011. The federated 
> search service will go offline and all links from partner sites to 
> Scitopia will be deactivated. 
> 
> Scitopia.org was created through the imagination and collaboration of 
> leading science and engineering societies. Seeking a better way to help 
> researchers quickly discover the quality content they need, these society 
> publishers developed a gateway to the research most cited in scholarly 
> work and patents.  Over the past few years, Scitopia.org was able to build 
> up a quality reputation for search efficiency and precision that has been 
> adopted by many researchers around the world. 
> 
> Why is the portal coming to an end? While traffic to the site initially 
> was healthy, it has proved a challenge for a free service such as Scitopia 
> to maintain or expand usage given the size, scope, and resources of 
> competitive search engines. At our current level of usage, the cost of 
> maintaining the service could no longer be justified by the society 
> partners. 

  Can you make the data freely available in bulk, say on an oai-pmh
  repository, or an ftp site, for others to use in search engines or
  other value-added services hat they may build?

  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                      http://authorprofile.org/pkr1
                                               skype: thomaskrichel