Research with an eye on the web - infoscience.epfl.ch new version

Infoscience lets users manage articles, conference papers, working papers, reports, and a dozen other types of scientific or pedagogic documents. EPFL's institutional archive has grown since its creation to more than 60,000 publications references of which 25,000 are supplemented by the entire text. Unlike commercial databases like Web of Science, Inspec or Chemical Abstracts, an institutional archive provides access to all indicated information on the web for free. This immense scientific content is regularly acknowledged by the international reference classification Webometrics. In the 2010 edition, Infoscience ranks 5th in the worldwide classification of institutional archives. This strong visibility is the result of an indexation optimization driven by research motors and OAI (Open Archive Initiative) harvesters.

On March 15th, 2010 you will discover the new version of Infoscience which offers essential improvements:

• More user-friendly: automated entry of bibliographic references. From a simple PUBMED, Web of Science or SCOPUS ID record, or even the entry of a part of a title, the bibliographic fields of a publication are automatically filled.
• More export functions: the export of references to a laboratory website of has been greatly and improved.
• More author oriented: capture system assisted by authors' names, link with their SCIPER numbers. For transdisciplinary works, several affiliated pieces can be managed simultaneously.
• More Open access compatible: consequently the system indicates if the release of a full text respects the copyright. Infoscience now manages several files for a same publication and supports numerous different full text formats.
• More complete: Infoscience consequently lets users add and manage the primary data from experiments in nearly 100 different file formats (with a large storage capacity by file). This functionality allows the memory of the most important experiments and essential scientific proofs for at least 10 years to be kept, as required by the EPFL Directive on scientific integrity.

For more information
http://infoscience.epfl.ch
[email protected].

Interview with Benoît Deveaud-Plédran, EPFL Dean of Research

What is the purpose of Infoscience?
Let me say first of all that a researcher must be published in order to participate in a scientific debate. The main purpose of Infoscience is to offer a platform which provides access to investigations. One can be proud of the research carried out at EPFL. As Dean of Research my mission is to contribute to making sure that this research is seen and read. Infoscience is one of the levers of this visibility.

What is going to change with the new version to be released mid March?
Infoscience has truly become easily accessible. Gregory Favre, requirements engineer for this new version, did a tremendous job making its use friendly and intuitive. Ergonomics was simplified. As a researcher, I noted the difference. Before, I found certain functionalities to be complicated. In the definition of objectives, we made sure that the difficulties encountered by the users are resolved.

Accessibility - that is decidedly the keyword.
Everyone should be able to access the publications of all researchers, and every researcher must be able to indicate them easily and benefit from the best visibility possible. The School's Administration also got involved in favor of Open access - the free online availability of numerical content. It is one of the conditions established by the Swiss National Science Foundation that require that research results be accessible to the public. Let us not forget that thanks to Open access, a researcher can increase his chances of seeing his work read and quoted.

This new version of Infoscience also allows rough data from research work to be stored.
It is really one of the most important aspects of this new version, the possibility, which is now an ethical obligation, of storing original data with the published article.