Scirus Partners with Indian Institute of Science

Amsterdam, November 1st, 2006 – Elsevier today announced that Scirus, its free science-specific search engine, has partnered with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) to index their two institutional repositories, ePrints@IISc and etd@IISc. The former is an eprints archiving facility for the IISc research community and the latter a digital repository of theses and dissertations of IISc’ students and researchers. IISc represents Scirus’ first Indian partner. With over 250 million scientifically relevant pages to date, the addition of IISc content underscores Scirus’ continued mission to remain the most comprehensive search engine of science-focused content on the Web.

“Having recognized the need for preservation and dissemination of our scholarly information, IISc was one of the first Indian institutions to establish openly accessible repositories to support the needs of our students and faculty as well as researchers around the globe,” said Filbert Minj, Scientific Officer of the National Centre for Science Information. “Using Scirus’search solution we hope to bring world class electronic information services to the IISc community and remote users’ world wide.”

The Indian Institute of Science is scheduled to begin its Centenary Celebrations in a couple of years’ time. The National Center for Science Information (NCSI) and the JRD Tata Memorial Library of the IISc have been given the ambitious target of depositing all the papers and all the theses of IISc in the ePrints@IISc and etd@IISc repositories by then. According to IISc the partnership with Scirus is extremely valuable for mining this intellectual wealth in a very efficient manner.

“In our partnership with the IISc, we were committed to making their repositories more visible on their own site, as well maximizing their global accessibility via Scirus.com,” says Saskia van Acker, content manager of Scirus. “We have helped IISc increase the visibility of their services on campus by powering a combined search of both repositories on Scigate, IISc’s Science Information portal and making them a searchable source on Scirus. Working with such diverse repositories has become a critical component in our success with repository search partners around the globe.”

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About IISc
The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) was started in 1909 through the pioneering vision of J.N. Tata. Since then, it has grown into a premier institution of research and advanced instruction, with more than 2000 active researchers working in almost all frontier areas of science and technology. IISc is an institute of higher learning and is constantly in pursuit of excellence. It is one of the oldest and finest centres of its kind in India, and has a very high international standing in the academic world as well.

About Eprints Archiving Facility: ePrints@IISc
The National Centre for Science Information has set up an eprints archiving facility for the IISc research community, using the GNU EPrints software developed at the University of Southampton. This service enables the Institute community to archive their preprints, post-prints and other scholarly publications. In keeping with the objectives of the EPrints movement and the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) movement, this service assists the Institute researchers in self-archiving and long-term preservation of their scholarly publications, provides easy access to these publications world wide and improves impact of their research.http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in

About Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archiving Service: etd@IISc
This is the digital repository of Theses and Dissertations of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. This repository has been developed to capture, disseminate and preserve research theses of Indian Institute of Science. This service enables the research community of IISc to self archive their theses and dissertations. The service has been set up using DSpace, a BSD distributed licensed open source software, developed jointly by the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard (HP). This service complements the self-archiving service for research publications of IISc, the ePrints@IISc. http://etd.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in

About Scirus
Scirus is the most comprehensive science-focused search engine available on the Internet, supporting over one million researchers, scientists and students worldwide. Scirus offers users a unique combination of free Web information and journal content, clearly branding search results from proprietary sources, assuring users the validity of the content. Web sources searched by Scirus include research institutes, governments, scientific organizations, conferences, scientists’ homepages and company homepages worldwide. Optimized for science-related queries, Scirus uses a dictionary with over 1.6 million scientific terms, unique pattern recognition tools and linguistic analysis to classify the content type and recognize the relevance of 250 million scientifically relevant pages. Scirus offers users unique search functionalities such as the ability to search on bibliographical information and specific content types. Scirus is the recipient of numerous International awards, including the Search Engine Watch award for Best Specialty Search Engine and the WebAward for Best Search Engine or Directory.

About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier’s 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect, MD Consult, Scopus, bibliographic databases, and online reference works.world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services.

Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc, a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier’s ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

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