Elsevier and EarthChem Announce Linking Collaboration

AMSTERDAM, October 27, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

Elsevier Articles on SciVerse ScienceDirect and Datasets in the EarthChem Portal are Now Connected

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, and EarthChem, a portal facilitating discovery and accessibility of a consortium of databases, today announced they have implemented two-way linking between their respective Earth Sciences content.

"The linking of conventional scientific publications with broader databases that enable rapid and comprehensive searches is a critical next step in the transition from paper to electronic publishing," commented Rick Carlson, former editor of the Elsevier journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters and one of the founders of the EarthChem Consortium. "By having direct access to the EarthChem databases, geochemical researchers will now have push-button access to a wealth of related data that will allow them to better investigate the conclusions made in papers and extend them to broader datasets to facilitate new discoveries."

Elsevier-published research articles from 32 journals, hosted on SciVerse ScienceDirect will be automatically linked to the corresponding research datasets in the EarthChem portal, and vice versa, starting with the titles Geochimica Cosmochimica Acta, Chemical Geology, Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, and Lithos. The EarthChem portal provides access to data from federated community databases, namely PetDB, MetPetDB, SedDB, NAVDAT, and GEOROC, as well as unpublished data from the USGS and the GANSEKI database of the Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology JAMSTEC. Elsevier is the first publisher to offer direct linking from a scientific article to an EarthChem dataset.

Dr. Kerstin Lehnert (LDEO), Director of the Integrated Earth Data Applications (IEDA) facility and the Geoinformatics for Geochemistry Program, added, "Through this collaboration, more researchers will be able to discover and access the data. They will be able to directly explore and analyze the data, comparing and combining them with millions of data points from other studies that are accessible on the EarthChem portal. Additionally, the flow of data into trusted archives is promoted and the long-term storage, wide availability and preservation of large research data sets is supported."

This initiative is the latest output of the Article of the Future project, Elsevier's ongoing commitment to improve the reader experience in all areas of online article presentation, enriched and value-added content, and interoperability with external databases. Elsevier started a similar collaboration with the introduction in February 2010 of reciprocal linking between Elsevier and PANGAEA, and is continually looking to collaborate with other relevant organizations.

About EarthChem

EarthChem is a community-driven effort to facilitate the preservation, discovery, access and visualization of the widest and richest geoscience datasets possible, operated by the Integrated Earth Data Applications (IEDA)_data facility with funding from the US National Science Foundation at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in collaboration with the University of Kansas,. EarthChem's web portal offers distributed searches for geochemical data in a federation of geoscience databases for easy discovery and accessibility of geochemical data, covering PetDB, MetPetDB, SedDB, NAVDAT, GEOROC, the USGS National Geochemical Database, and the Japanese GANSEKI database. The EarthChem portal features standardized and integrated data output format, map interfaces, and tools for data quality assessment and data analysis and visualization.

About Integrated Earth Data Applications (IEDA)

IEDA is a community-based facility that serves to support, sustain, and advance the geosciences by providing data services for observational Geoscience data from the Ocean, Earth, and Polar Sciences. IEDA systems serve as primary community data collections for global geochemistry and marine Geoscience research to support the preservation, discovery, retrieval, and analysis of a wide range of observational field and analytical data types, enabling these data to be discovered and reused by a diverse community now and in the future. IEDA provides free and open access to all data holdings. IEDA is a partnership between the Geoinformatics for Geochemistry program (GfG) and the Marine Geoscience Data System (MGDS). GfG and MGDS systems include the geochemistry data network EarthChem, the geochemical databases PetDB and SedDB, the Ridge2000 and MARGINS Data Portals, the Academic Seismic Portal field data collection, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Data System, the Global Multi Resolution Topography synthesis, and the System for Earth Sample Registration SESAR. IEDA is funded by the US National Science Foundation through a Cooperative Agreement.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading provider 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 The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include SciVerse ScienceDirect, SciVerse Scopus, Reaxys, MD Consult and Nursing Consult, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a world-leading publisher and information provider, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

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