ScientificCommons at http://www.scientificcommons.org/ helps access the largely distributed sources with their vast amount of scientific publications using a common interface. It identifies authors from all archives and makes their social and professional relationships transparent and visible to anyone across disciplinary, institutional and technological boundaries.

The goal of the Scientific Commons website is “to develop the worlds largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public.” This concept was developed by the University of St.Gallen in Switzerland and the project is now hosted at the Institute for Media and Communications Management.

Currently, the website has indexed about 13 million scientific publications and extracted 6 million authors’ names out of this data.

The core functions of the project include the identification of repositories, the indexing of full-text documents, the extraction of author relationships and personalisation services.

The website uses the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to retrieve scientific knowledge data. Repositories who support the OAI-PMH Protocol can add their content to the website index by manually adding their OAI URL.

Authors are identified from their scientific publications across institutions and various archives. The social relations between the authors is then extracted and displayed, that helps to understand research developments, making them transparent to the public.

Scientificcommons.org structures and combines the scientific data to knowledge areas using ontologies. Lexical and statistical methods are used to identify, extract and analyse keywords. This process helps classify the scientific data and deploy it for navigational and weighting purposes.

At the last count a massive list of 16,845,381 publications and 71,16,285 authors have been indexed.

Presently, the project has been indexing metadata as well as full-text documents in many file formats. It would soon support the Open Document Format.

The documents are stored at scientificcommons.org for caching purposes and are periodically refreshed By supporting open access initiatives to science knowledge everywhere. ScientificCommons.org aims to become a single repository to provide free access to most of the data which are behind subscription-only walls.