A group of scholarly societies is uniting to create more direct access to their collective content. In June, thirteen of the world's leading science and technology societies will launch scitopia.org, a free federated vertical search portal that will enable users to explore the research most cited in scholarly work and patents in a single click.

Scitopia.org will aggregate the entire electronic libraries of the leading voices in major science and technology disciplines. More than three million documents, including peer-reviewed journal content and conference proceedings, spanning 150 years of science and technology will be searched through this dedicated gateway. Founding partners include:

• American Geophysical Union (AGU)
• American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)
• American Institute of Physics (AIP)
• American Physical Society (APS)
• American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
• American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
• The Electrochemical Society (ECS)
• IEEE
• Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP)
• Optical Society of America (OSA)
• SPIE
• Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE)
• Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)

Other organizations will be invited to join as the project progresses.

Visitors to scitopia.org will be presented with a simple, but function-rich interface. They will be able to search for full text articles using a fielded approach, for example, by article title or author name. Searches will be narrowed to gather very specific publisher content or broadened to scan the complete databases of all the partners. Search results will include the article's title, authors and citation. Once a piece of content is selected, the user will be directed to the publisher's digital library site to access the full text. Researchers at institutions with subscriptions to the content will be automatically authenticated and will be able to click through to it. Members of partner societies may also be able to access full text, depending upon the association's membership policies. Pay-per-view options will allow others to purchase as many articles as they choose.

As a federated search, no new subscriptions will be needed to use Scitopia.org. For example, a subscriber to a single journal published by SIAM could access the content via scitopia.org or through the SIAM web site. Additionally, because scitopia.org links directly to each society's digital library, searching will access real-time information, providing the most current research.

(www.scitopia.org)

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