Technology Innovation: Where Elsevier Has Led and Contributed
By Chris Shillum, Vice President, Product Technology, Elsevier, New York, NY, USA
Chris Shillum
Through our leadership and participation in technological innovations, Elsevier has played a significant role in the advent and continuing development of online publishing. On a more micro level, technological innovation has been at the core of our enterprise as we’ve developed best-in-class electronic resources — helping make life easier and more productive for librarians, scholars and practitioners worldwide.
No two ways about it, the continuum that is technological innovation and our involvement in it have driven our ability to publish online journals and books such as on ScienceDirect, and to create other online products including EMBASE.com, Engineering Village and MD Consult. Further, the experience we gained as innovators and early adopters has enabled us to develop Scopus and within it functionality not available anywhere else, i.e., the Citation Tool and Author Identifier.
References to Elsevier's leadership in publishing technology occur fairly often across Elsevier websites and publications, including this one. Yet, while librarians and users may easily find lists of Elsevier’s e-products (see www.elsevier.com), it may be more challenging to tick off technological innovations we've helped develop — as a creator,contributor or early adopter. Hence, I’ve created the table on these pages.
Overall, the impacts of our investment in technological innovation may best be told by the success of our products and the success of our authors, editors and customers. 
TULIP |
Seminal early 1990s cooperative research project in conjunction with nine universities to test systems for networked delivery and use of journals on the user’s desktop
www.elsevier.com/locate/tulip |
• We were the first publisher to make local library hosting of journal content possible with ScienceServer software (now succeeded by Journals Onsite) and ScienceDirect onsite deliveries.
• There is still no real equivalent of ScienceServer / JOS from anyone else. |
1991-1996 |
SGML / XML |
Standard Generalized Markup Language and eXtensible Markup Language — standards for adding syntactical and semantic markup to text |
• We were an early adopter of SGML, and were one of the first publishers to commit to a workflow completely based on SGML.
• We were the first to develop a comprehensive DTD (Document Type Definition) for scientific journal articles which was published to the world, allowing anyone to use it, modify it and distribute modified versions. Very many scientific publishers have since re-used or modified our DTD. |
1993 - |
STIX |
Scientific and Technical Information eXchange project to develop a free set of fonts for scientific and technical publishing
www.stixfonts.org |
• We were among initiators of the STIX initiative.
• Our participation was based on the Elsevier Science grid of scientific and linguistic characters and on extensive analysis of usage of such symbols in our publications. |
1995 - |
Digital Object
Identifier
(DOI)
CrossRef
|
System for identifying content objects in the digital environment
www.doi.org
A cross-publisher citation linking system based on DOIs
www.crossref.org |
• We have led in article identification and cross-referencing and were instrumental in gathering support for both DOI and CrossRef.
• We have more DOIs assigned than any other publisher.
• We were a founding member of CrossRef and among the first publishers to get CrossRef citation linking operational in our online products.
|
1999 - |
MathML |
A specification for describing mathematics as a basis for machine-to-machine communication
www.w3.org/Math |
• We were among early contributors to development of the MathML standard.
• We were an early large-scale adopter of this standard.
• In preparation of that adoption we again contributed to the MathML standard. |
1999 -
2003 |
Retrospective Journal Digitization |
Elsevier’s “backfiles” project to digitize all journal content back to volume 1, issue 1 |
• We were the first commercial scientific publisher who started doing this.
• We pushed the boundaries for large-scale digitization projects.
• We set a trend that many other publishers are now emulating. |
2000 - 2005 |
OpenURL |
A syntax to create Web-transportable packages of metadata and / or identifiers
www.niso.org/standards/
standard_detail.cfm?std_id=783 |
• We were the first publisher to make local library hosting of journal content possible with ScienceServer software (now succeeded by Journals Onsite) and ScienceDirect onsite deliveries.
• There is still no real equivalent of ScienceServer / JOS from anyone else. |
1991-1996 |
Shibboleth |
Standards-based, open source software providing federated access control to online services across or within organizational boundaries
http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ |
• Elsevier has served as an early adopter of
• Shibboleth within the STM publisher community.
• We were the first vendor to support the US-based InCommon Shibboleth federation in production.
• We have contributed to community discussions on best practice for multifederation user interface design. |
2002 - |
NISO MetaSearch
Initiative |
Definition of industry standards for searching across multiple databases, sources, platforms, protocols, and vendors at one time
www.niso.org/committees/
MS_initiative.html |
• Endeavor is contributing to this standard as co-chair of the search and retrieval task group. |
2003 - |
ISSN |
International Standard Serial Number
www.issn.org |
• We are contributing to the effort to revise the ISSN standard.
|
2004 - |
MedBiquitous |
Organization creating a technology blueprint for professional healthcare education based on XML and Web services standards
www.medbiq.org |
• We have participated in helping define standards.
• Darin McBeath, with Elsevier’s Advanced Technology Group, is an XML architect and has
• served as a member of the MedBiquitous Technical Steering Committee.
• Elsevier developed XML Schema Guidelines and other artifacts for this organization. |
2002 - 2006 |
TEK |
Time Equals Knowledge, an MIT project to build a low-bandwidth search engine for use in developing countries
http://tek.sourceforge.net/ |
• Elsevier is collaborating to make Scirus available via TEK technology.
• This collaborative project is called “Search Scirus with TEK.” |
2005 - |
XQuery |
A standard XML-based query language
www.w3.org/TR/xquery/ |
• We participated in development of W3C XQuery.
• We developed XQuery Style Conventions for the XQuery community.
• We initiated and continue to lead the open source xqDoc project (www.xqdoc.org). |
2005 - |
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