Elsevier articles now enriched with graphical information from PANGAEA data sets

ElsevierJul 29 2010

- Elsevier Articles now Graphically Enriched With Information From PANGAEA Data Sets

Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, and PANGAEA - Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data - today announced their next step in interconnecting the diverse elements of scientific research. Elsevier articles at ScienceDirect are now enriched with graphical information linking to associated research data sets that are deposited at PANGAEA. This enrichment functionality offers a blueprint of how Elsevier would like to work with data set repositories all over the world.

This next step follows the introduction, last February, of 'reciprocal linking' - automatically linking research data sets deposited at PANGAEA to corresponding articles in Elsevier journals on its electronic platform ScienceDirect and vice versa. The new feature adds a map to every ScienceDirect article that has associated research data at PANGAEA; it displays all geographical locations for which such data is available. A single click then brings the user from the ScienceDirect article to the research data set at PANGAEA.

"With an increasing interest in the preservation of research data, it is very important to make those data clearly visible in the context of the formal research publications," commented IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Vice President Content Innovation at Elsevier. "Elsevier is committed to advance science by investing in such collaborations with data set repositories. This new feature will allow readers to easily go beyond the content of an article, and drill down to the research data sets."

Dr. Michael Diepenbroek, Managing Director of PANGAEA at the MARUM Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, Bremen University, added: "This continuing collaboration with Elsevier is an excellent example of an overall system of deeply connected data archives and publishers which offers better prospects for the quality and reliability of scientific information. The availability of scientific data in context is one of the key factors for the further development in empirical sciences. The realization of large scale and/or complex science approaches requires consistent quality assured data compiled from various projects and science fields. Also, the verification and thus the credibility of scientific results relies on full transparency and explicit reference to underlying data and related methods."

The linking of data and content has the potential to streamline the research process, bringing relevant information to researchers with fewer clicks and through quicker searches. Judson Dunham, Senior Product Manager at ScienceDirect: "This highlights the value that ScienceDirect can deliver on its platform by giving researchers the papers they need and helping them to put those papers in context, delivering unique value to the user. ScienceDirect has built the capability to quickly plug in specialized applications like this as they are developed, so that external data or relevant analysis tools can be integrated directly in the online article as opportunities emerge. More such integrations are planned for the near future."