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Appendix I: Technology Innovation
| Technology | What is it? | What role has Elsevier played? | When? |
| 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 |
The first publisher to make local library hosting of journal content possible with ScienceServer software and ScienceDirect OnSite deliveries. |
1991 – 1996 |
| SGML / XML | Standard Generalized Markup Language and eXtensible Markup Language — standards for adding syntactical and semantic markup to text | An early adopter of SGML, and among the first publishers to commit to a workflow completely based on SGML. 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. Many scientific publishers have since reused 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 |
Among the initiators of the STIX initiative. Based our input 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 |
A leader in article identification and cross-referencing. Instrumental in gathering support for both DOI and CrossRef. 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 |
Early contributor to development of the MathML standard. Early large-scale adopter of this standard. |
1999 – 2003 |
| Retrospective Journal Digitization |
Elsevier’s “backfiles” project to digitize all journal content back to volume 1, issue 1 | First commercial scientific publisher to do this. Pushed the boundaries for large-scale digitization projects. Set a trend that many publishers now emulate. |
2000 – 2005 |
| OpenURL | A syntax to create
Web-transportable packages
of metadata or identifiers
about an information object www.niso.org/standards/standard_detail.cfm?std_id=783 |
Contributed to OpenURL via the membership of Elsevier’s Advanced Technology Group in the NISO OpenURL committee. |
2001 – 2004 |
| Shibboleth | Standards-based, open source
software providing federated
access control to online services
across or within organizational
boundaries
http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ |
An early adopter of Shibboleth within the STM publisher community. The first vendor to support the US-based InCommon Shibboleth federation in production. Contributed to community discussions on best practice for multifederation user interface design. |
2002 – |
| ISSN | International Standard Serial Number
www.issn.org |
Contributing to the effort to revise the ISSN standard. |
2004 – |
| MedBiquitous | Organization creating a technology
blueprint for professional
health care education based on
XML and Web services standards
www.medbiq.org |
Represented by Darin McBeath, an XML architect with Elsevier’s Advanced Technology Group, on the MedBiquitous Technical Steering Committee. |
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 |
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/ |
Participated in development of W3C XQuery. Developed XQuery Style Conventions for the XQuery community. Initiated and continue to lead the open source xqDoc project (www.xqdoc.org). |
2005 – |
Any guide to journal publishing must provide orientation to recent key developments in technology innovation, for they have revolutionized the publishing of scholarly articles and journals.
Through our leadership and participation in technology innovations, Elsevier has played a significant role in the advent and continuing development of online publishing. On a more micro level, technology 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, researchers and practitioners worldwide.
The continuum that is technology innovation and our involvement in it have driven our ability to publish online journals and books 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.
As Elsevier looks to the future, we offer gratitude to the many organizations partnering with us to achieve technology innovations. Working alongside an impressive array of partners, we look forward to helping achieve even greater innovations facilitating research across the globe. 
[Editor’s note: This table and timeline were first published in the Library Connect Newsletter, 4(4), October 2006.]
“I have been very pleased with the services of Elsevier. The attention to detail and customer responsiveness are just two of the many reasons I am happy to be associated with Elsevier. Others are technological support and innovativeness with the initiation of the Web-based service, EES, and dependability of product output. Personal service from warm, friendly production managers and publishers is big plus.”
— Jan Odom-Forren, Co-editor, Journal of PeriAnesthesia Nursing
