Scitation, the online hosting platform of the American Institute of Physics (AIP), and 30 scientific and technical publishers formally introduced the C³ development initiative at the recently concluded Online Information 2008. The programme, which began over a year ago with the release of Web 2.0-enabled abstract displays, is seen to set the standard for agile platform development in scholarly publishing.
C³ incorporates two critical pieces of infrastructure - an XML content server, with content storage, access, product development and enrichment capabilities, and a web content management system, with presentational, contextual and connection capabilities. Together they will seek to provide an extensible platform that connects users with meaningful content in the context they choose and deliver the tools they need to integrate with that content.
The new platform emerging from the initiative will begin taking shape in 2009 as the sites of AIP and other publishers are migrated to the new infrastructure. Moving forward, additional enhancements to features and functionality will be added, including advanced tagging and categorisation; greater integration with popular web applications to accommodate features such as mash ups and geographic tracking; flexible publisher tools for adding and controlling content in real time; and enriching the functionality of non-journal content such as books, standards, magazines and newsletters.
Scitation currently hosts over 1,500,000 articles from more than 185 scholarly publications for 30 learned society publishers, in fields including physics, chemistry, geosciences, engineering and acoustics. AIP also offers a suite of customisable publishing services, covering every aspect of content development, from processing of author submissions through print and online distribution of final deliverables.
