For immediate release, July 1, 2002
INGENTA SIGNS STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON TO
CREATE OPEN ARCHIVE E-PRINT SERVICES
Ingenta plc, which empowers the exchange of scholarly and professional
research content online, has signed a strategic partnership with the
University of Southampton to develop software which will form a key part of
the growing Open Archives movement.
The University has played a key role in the Open Archives initiative (OAi);
with the development of the leading software resource supporting the
initiative. ePrints, created by the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science, allows organisations such as universities to create web-based
archives (e-print services) for their research articles, lecture notes and
other documents and associated metadata. Virginia Tech, the University of
Glasgow and the Australian National University are among the hundreds of
organisations worldwide who have implemented the software in order to
provide easy and open access to the activities being undertaken by their
researchers.
The goal of the OAi movement is to create inter-operability between these
archives, ultimately allowing web users to search a number of them
simultaneously. This would result in a powerful new distribution channel
through which researchers could collaborate. This will sit alongside and
complement the formally published and peer-reviewed scientific literature
provided by journal publishers. For this goal to be realised, many
participating institutions will need to rely on commercially supported
software and a standardised data input model. It is to create this service
that Ingenta and Southampton have agreed to collaborate.
Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, Wendy Hall,
CBE explains: "There is a rapidly growing momentum behind the OAi movement,
and behind the use of Southampton's ePrints software. However, if the
movement is to deliver its ultimate vision, participating institutions need
to rely on a robust and standardised infrastructure. It is this
infrastructure that we will be creating in this ground-breaking strategic
partnership with Ingenta."
Under the terms of the strategic partnership, Ingenta will create an
enhanced, commercially supported version of ePrints, which it will make
available as a service to institutions worldwide. A share of the proceeds
will be channelled back into supporting Southampton's research and
development efforts in continuing to evolve ePrints, which will also remain
available as open source software.
Commenting on the partnership, Mark Rowse, Chief Executive, Ingenta said:
"Ingenta is renowned for creating robust and large-scale search facilities
for published scholarly content on the Web, but we and our publisher
customers recognise that the researcher requires more than formally
published articles to fulfil their research needs. Together with
Southampton University, we will create complementary e-print services that
assist the researcher, the librarian and the institution in providing
access to and archiving the whole of the research cycle."
For more information, editorial contributions and photography, please contact:
Amanda Procter
Ingenta plc
Tel: +44 (0)1865 799022
amanda.proc...@ingenta.com
About Ingenta
www.ingenta.com
Ingenta is the global market leader in the management and distribution of
published scientific, professional and academic research via the Internet,
and develops and maintains specialist websites for publishers,
self-publishing societies and libraries.
For publishers of scientific, professional and academic periodicals,
journals and reference works, Ingenta provides a suite of publisher
services including data conversion, secure online hosting, access control
and distribution services. For libraries and information professionals,
Ingenta offers collection management and comprehensive document delivery
options. Ingenta's collection of research content - 12 million articles
from more than 5,400 online publications and 26,000 fax delivered
publications - is accessed by over 5 million researchers and librarians a
month via ingenta.com and other websites, making Ingenta one of the 10
largest Web service providers in the UK (New Media Age).
In October 2000 and 2001, InfoWorld named Ingenta one of the top 100
e-businesses in the World. In March 2002, the BT/The Guardian Vision 100
survey named Ingenta as one of the top 100 most visionary companies in the
UK. Ingenta is listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange.
About Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia (IAM) Research Group, part of the
Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton
http://www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk
The Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia (IAM) Group follows a broad-based,
multi- and inter- disciplinary research agenda that focuses on the design
and application of computing systems for complex information and knowledge
processing tasks. With around 80 researchers, IAM is an international
leader in the three major themes that converge in the Group's tripartite
title:
* intelligence: examining the fundamental principles of intelligent and
adaptive behaviour and developing methods and services for acquiring,
modelling, reusing, retrieving, publishing and maintaining knowledge;
* agents: devising new methods and models for inter-agent interactions such
as cooperation, coordination and negotiation, developing novel real-world
applications and pioneering work on agent-oriented software engineering;
* multimedia: investigating the basic principles and applications of
multimedia, hypermedia and document management in large scale open systems
such as digital libraries, devising new models for scientific publications,
and developing context aware, personalised information management systems.
These three research themes also combine synergistically in a number of
grand challenges for computer science - including grid computing, the
semantic web, and pervasive computing environments. All of these domains
can be classified as large-scale, open, distributed systems in which
entities (people and software), representing different stakeholders, act
and interact in flexible ways to achieve their individual and collective
goals. It is, perhaps, in tackling such problems that the true value of the
IAM endeavour can be best demonstrated.
