The mission of World Wide Science (www.worldwidescience.org) is to accelerate scientific discovery and progress by providing a one-stop-search of global science sources. A global science gateway the World Wide Science provides access to various national and international scientific databases and portals.

Its endeavour is to capitalise on existing technology to search collections of science information distributed across the globe. The World Wide Science facilitates the much-needed access to both prominent as well as smaller and less well-known sources of highly valuable scientific resources.

Just a click on the interactive map of the world's countries at worldwidescience.org helps to locate participants and their websites. A list of available resources pops up almost immediately to the right of the world map. The federated search facility at WorldWideScience.org provides quite a coverage of global science resources and research results.

The seeker can search multiple data sources with a single query from the user interface. When a query is entered in the search box it is sent to every individual database or portal. The individual data sources return a list of results for each search query. The results from all the resources are ranked in the order of relevance. The results are linked to expanded information and can be viewed by date, rank, source, title or author.

The results may include full text (if supported by the database(s) being searched), bibliographic citations, and other types of material from international databases and resources. The search methodology adopted by WorldWideScience.org has some key advantages over the existing crawler-based search engines. It does not place any requirements or burdens on owners of the individual data sources, other than handling increased traffic.

Federated searches are inherently as up-to-date as the individual data sources are as they are searched in real time. Users can get most of the current findings in the fields of energy, medicine, agriculture, environment, and basic sciences, which are published by contributing nations. The user can review this hit list and then move over to the host site to browse for more detailed information. As WorldWideScience searches in real time, sometimes, it does take a little longer to get the results.

The goal of WorldWideScience.org is to make the world's science readily and easily available to researchers and citizens all over the globe.

The global science gateway initiative began with a Statement of Intent to partner between the United States and the United Kingdom. Since then, a multilateral partnership, the WorldWide Science Alliance, has been formed to provide a geographically diverse, long-term governance structure. The Alliance is committed to promote and build upon the original vision of a global science gateway. Currently, 32 resources from 44 countries, including India, are searchable through WorldWideScience.org.

The four important science information sources from India include The Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian Institute of Science Eprints, the Indian Institute of Science Theses & Dissertations and the Indian Medlars Centre .

Among the other global resources are Japan's J-EAST, J-STAGE, J-STORE and Journal@rchive, UK's PubMed Central and Electronic Table of Contents (ETOC), Germany's Vascoda, Finland's VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland-Publications and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland-Research, Denmark's DEFF Global E Prints and DEFF Research Database, Scientific Electronic Library Online (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Portugal, Spain), Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, France's Article@INIST, The Australian Antarctic Data Centre, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, South Africa's CSIR Research Space, Canada's Defence Research and Development Canada, Sweden's Directory of Open Access Journals, the African Journals Online, KoreaScience, Netherlands' NARCIS and USA's Science.gov.  WorldWideScience.org facilitates access to only quality and authoritative scientific information related to current research as provided by the participating nations.

Much of the information accessed via WorldWideScience.org gateway is freely available and in the open domain.  Efforts are underway to make additional science information resources accessible via WorldWideScience.org. For more details about this global gateway to scientific resources you can visit worldwidescience.org.

N S Soundar Rajan