30 oktober 2006
Scirus is heating up the competition with Scopus
Scirus has signed a deal with CrossRef. There should be a story behind it. I can only guess.
Competition is good. It sets the stage for innovation and real progress. So when I observe a new born competition between Scirus and Scopus I should herald it as "good for us". Okay, fair enough. But I can't quite understand it. These are two fairly recent products from Elsevier's stables. Albeit Scirus is a wee bit older, but certainly not of the same age as EmBase or Geobase. But now these two youngsters are competing with each other already!
They are very different though. Scirus is the free scientific web search engine. Very good at finding, indexing and presenting free available scholarly material on the Web. Scirus is a fulltext search engine. It may come as a surprise but Scirus was a real breakthrough in the scientific information domain. Scirus was already there, long before Google Scholar was born.
Scopus on the other hand has only been around for about two years -it seems longer though. Scopus is an entirely different product from Scirus. Scopus is a broad, allround, scholarly bibliographic database. Build on good metadata standards. An information specialist's dream come true. Spurious information retrieval possibilities, so now and then even complicated techniques are made possible. It is the Rolls Royce of Elsevier's (bibliographic) search engines. It comes therefore at some costs and I thought Scopus would face the competition from products such as Web of Science, Current Contents, Medline, PsychInfo or Chemical Abstracts to name a few. Perhaps in competition with other Elsevier products such as Embase, Engineering Index or Geobase as well.
However, the announcement that Scirus has signed a deal with CrossRef leaves me flabbergasted. Why?
One take of the story I can follow, is the following: Google was the first to be allowed to play around with the CrossRef data. They didn't do their job very well, but it was perhaps the start of Google Scholar. Recently Microsoft Live, got the honour of being the "first official CrossRef Web Services Search Partner". Google was somewhere lost from the picture, but after a first we need a second. Don't we? So there was Elsevier with Scirus. BTW the number of publishers participating in CrossRef has increased in the mean time from 1700 (in the WLA press announcement) to 2200 participating publishers and societies. The deal between Scirus and CrossRef however, enables Scirus to index heaps of metadata form publishers they (Elsevier) have deals with anyway through their Scopus programme. But since Google and Microsoft got their deals with CrossRef, Scirus had to follow apparently.
But take two of the story reads as follows: Scopus has been under construction for the past few years. They have signed deals with some 5000 publishers to receive their metadata. Okay, CrossRef -Elsevier was heavily involced in the creation of CrossRef- has not signed quite that number of publishers yet, but the number is increasing steadily. So in the sense that they only have metadata at their disposal Scirus and Scopus become very similar, i.e. a metadata/bibliographic search engine such as Scopus compared to a fulltext search engine.
Putting the proper price tag on each product, free versus fee, I don't undertand the move. Scirus should remain and marketed as, fulltext, but free scholarly search engine. Whereas Scopus is the formal, metadata but fee-based, bibliographic search engine.
Somehow Elsevier manages to blurr the lines between the two products, so now and then.
So for now, let's enjoy the improved -partial- content of Scirus.
Hattip: ResourceShelf
Technorati tags: scirus; Scopus;
Competition is good. It sets the stage for innovation and real progress. So when I observe a new born competition between Scirus and Scopus I should herald it as "good for us". Okay, fair enough. But I can't quite understand it. These are two fairly recent products from Elsevier's stables. Albeit Scirus is a wee bit older, but certainly not of the same age as EmBase or Geobase. But now these two youngsters are competing with each other already!
They are very different though. Scirus is the free scientific web search engine. Very good at finding, indexing and presenting free available scholarly material on the Web. Scirus is a fulltext search engine. It may come as a surprise but Scirus was a real breakthrough in the scientific information domain. Scirus was already there, long before Google Scholar was born.
Scopus on the other hand has only been around for about two years -it seems longer though. Scopus is an entirely different product from Scirus. Scopus is a broad, allround, scholarly bibliographic database. Build on good metadata standards. An information specialist's dream come true. Spurious information retrieval possibilities, so now and then even complicated techniques are made possible. It is the Rolls Royce of Elsevier's (bibliographic) search engines. It comes therefore at some costs and I thought Scopus would face the competition from products such as Web of Science, Current Contents, Medline, PsychInfo or Chemical Abstracts to name a few. Perhaps in competition with other Elsevier products such as Embase, Engineering Index or Geobase as well.
However, the announcement that Scirus has signed a deal with CrossRef leaves me flabbergasted. Why?
One take of the story I can follow, is the following: Google was the first to be allowed to play around with the CrossRef data. They didn't do their job very well, but it was perhaps the start of Google Scholar. Recently Microsoft Live, got the honour of being the "first official CrossRef Web Services Search Partner". Google was somewhere lost from the picture, but after a first we need a second. Don't we? So there was Elsevier with Scirus. BTW the number of publishers participating in CrossRef has increased in the mean time from 1700 (in the WLA press announcement) to 2200 participating publishers and societies. The deal between Scirus and CrossRef however, enables Scirus to index heaps of metadata form publishers they (Elsevier) have deals with anyway through their Scopus programme. But since Google and Microsoft got their deals with CrossRef, Scirus had to follow apparently.
But take two of the story reads as follows: Scopus has been under construction for the past few years. They have signed deals with some 5000 publishers to receive their metadata. Okay, CrossRef -Elsevier was heavily involced in the creation of CrossRef- has not signed quite that number of publishers yet, but the number is increasing steadily. So in the sense that they only have metadata at their disposal Scirus and Scopus become very similar, i.e. a metadata/bibliographic search engine such as Scopus compared to a fulltext search engine.
Putting the proper price tag on each product, free versus fee, I don't undertand the move. Scirus should remain and marketed as, fulltext, but free scholarly search engine. Whereas Scopus is the formal, metadata but fee-based, bibliographic search engine.
Somehow Elsevier manages to blurr the lines between the two products, so now and then.
So for now, let's enjoy the improved -partial- content of Scirus.
Hattip: ResourceShelf
Technorati tags: scirus; Scopus;
Labels: English
