Serials Solutions Provides the Summon Service to Support Research4Life
Seattle – July 19, 2011 – Serials Solutions®, a business unit of ProQuest® LLC, will support the three United Nations-sponsored Research4Life programs via its award-winning Summon™ discovery service. Research4Life is the collective name given to HINARI, AGORA and OARE, the three programs that offer developing countries free or very low cost online access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content provided by the world’s leading publishers. Beginning with a pilot for HINARI, Serials Solutions will provide complete Summon™ sites for each Research4Life program that enable simple, fast, unified discovery of the entire Research4Life research collections. In addition, professional librarians on staff at Serials Solutions are volunteering time and expertise to create individual Summon™ search sites for eligible countries.
“Serials Solutions shares a fundamental value with Research4Life: we believe that research can change lives,” said Michael Gersch, senior vice-president of ProQuest and general manager, Serials Solutions. “Publishers have generously provided a rich collection of resources to Research4Life; Serials Solutions has technology and expertise to make that collection significantly more accessible through simple, powerful discovery. We’re deeply proud to share our resources and join with the organizations who are working to eliminate the knowledge gap around the world.”
A partnership that functions entirely on the basis of good will, Research4Life embodies the concept that research in health, agriculture and the environment is better informed when it is based on the most recent, high quality and relevant scientific knowledge. Research4Life applies the concept by delivering knowledge to the world’s poorest countries via libraries in universities, colleges, research institutes and government ministries as well as non-governmental organizations and hospitals. It has amassed an online collection of more than 8,100 peer-reviewed international scientific journals, books, and databases. With the Summon™ service, researchers in developing countries will gain the ability to easily explore the entire Research4Life collection using cutting-edge discovery technology.
"After gaining access to a wealth of the world's published scientific literature, the next hurdle is finding the relevant information without getting overwhelmed,” said Kimberly Parker, HINARI Programme Manager at the World Health Organization. “Our low and middle income country researchers find this as challenging as any other researcher. It will be a significant boon for them to have a cutting edge tool with which to mine the depths of the information available to them through Research4Life."
Supported by a unique volunteer program, Serials Solutions is providing the technological architecture, while librarians on staff at the company are “adopting” countries, offering their time to provide the expertise needed to set-up individual sites. After an enthusiastic response from Serials Solutions’ staff, work is underway on individual sites for the more than 100 countries eligible for Research4Life – from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
Recognized as the Best Enterprise Search Solution at the 2011 CODiE Awards by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the Summon™ service offers the most compelling user experience by providing an easy and open discovery experience. The Summon™ service provides instant access to the breadth of authoritative content that is the hallmark of great libraries.
Currently, the Summon™ service allows researchers to search the full text of content from more than 7,000 providers and contains more than 750 million records. First introduced to the industry in July 2009, the Summon™ web-scale discovery service provides proven value to more than 250 libraries worldwide, many of whom seeing a substantial increase in the use of their library’s collections.
About Research4Life (www.research4life.org)
Research4Life is the collective name for three public-private partnerships which seek to help achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals by providing the developing world with access to critical scientific research. Since 2002, the three programmes, HINARI Access to Research in Health programme, Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) and Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), have given researchers at more than 5,000 institutions in 105 developing world countries free or low cost access to over 8,000 journals provided by the world’s leading science publishers.
Research4Life is a public-private partnership of the WHO, FAO, UNEP, Cornell and Yale Universities and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. Together with technology partner Microsoft, the partnership’s goal is to help attain six of the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015, reducing the scientific knowledge gap between industrialized countries and the developing world.
About Serials Solutions®
Serials Solutions® is the global leader in essential discovery and e-resource management solutions which are powered by a comprehensive knowledgebase. Its popular suite of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions helps improve access to and use of collections, eases librarian workloads, and ultimately reduces operating costs. Solutions include: the world-class Summon™ web-scale discovery service, providing instant access to the full breadth of the library’s collection through a single search; the AquaBrowser® discovery layer, making navigation more accessible; 360 services, the only integrated e-resource access and management solution; KnowledgeWorks, the authoritative e-resource knowledgebase and foundation for Serials Solutions® 360; and Ulrich’s™ services, the world’s most authoritative source of bibliographic and publisher information for serials and the most comprehensive source of print and electronic serials data available. Headquartered in Seattle, Serials Solutions is a member of the ProQuest® family of companies.
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