External link Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, announced the launch of External link SciVerse, an innovative platform that integrates the company's key products and encourages the scientific community to collaborate on the development of customized search and discovery applications. Elsevier has committed to releasing the APIs (application programming interfaces) for all of the content on SciVerse and will offer application development support tools on the site.

"SciVerse is a start of a new journey for Elsevier where we plan to provide customized search and discovery solutions and increase interoperability within our products and third party services," said Jay Katzen, managing director, Academic & Government Products, Elsevier. "We recognize that it is critical to involve the researchers and librarians in the creation of solutions as they are in the best position to identify and address their search and discovery challenges. By providing our content APIs later this year, we will empower researchers and developers to build custom applications to enhance their workflow and share these applications with the scientific community within SciVerse."

A multi-phased initiative aimed at accelerating science through applications targeted to specific researcher needs, at launch SciVerse will include SciVerse Hub beta, a module that integrates External link ScienceDirect, External link Scopus and targeted web content from Scirus, Elsevier's science-specific Internet search engine. SciVerse Hub beta allows for a single search across its integrated content with results ranked by relevancy and without duplication, saving valuable researcher time.

Combining familiar resources with new efficiencies, SciVerse also enables interoperability among ScienceDirect, Scopus and the new SciVerse Hub beta. For example, ScienceDirect users who also subscribe to Scopus will now be able to access key author information without leaving the article, and link directly into comprehensive lists of all an author's documents and citations in Scopus.

SciVerse Hub beta will include three search and discovery applications at launch: Methods section search application - allows researchers to search only the methodology and protocol sections of full-text articles; Matching Sentences application - returns search results with the query words highlighted in the full sentence where they appear; Prolific Authors application - prominently displays the most prolific authors for each search result.

The initial applications offer an example of the possible solutions that can be built using content APIs and were developed by NextBio, a provider of a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform for life sciences researchers which includes ontology-based semantic tools. Elsevier began collaborating with NextBio in 2009

Elsevier will begin rolling out its APIs on SciVerse in Q4 of this year including content APIs for ScienceDirect, Scopus, and SciVerse Hub beta. In opening up this trusted content to development by the worldwide scientific and developer communities, SciVerse will allow for collaboration on applications that meet specific researcher challenges and enable the creation of customized solutions for efficiently finding, using and re-using SciVerse content.

"As a physician scientist, there is vast amount of information that is available for potential discoveries which has limited my ability to find and consume the right information in the time I have available for research," said Dr Fatima Cody Stanford, Palmetto Health/University of South Carolina School of Medicine. "Applications that provide more intelligent results will significantly improve my workflow. I am very excited about the first SciVerse applications and eager to see new additions as the larger community begins development."

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including External link The Lancet and External link Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders.