FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 17, 2011
Contact: Lauren Marley, 703/379-7563

GeoScienceWorld Portal Debuts on HighWire’s Open Platform –
New Look, Features, and Google Maps™ Searching

Alexandria, VA – GeoScienceWorld (GSW) is pleased to announce a set of major portal upgrades. As of today, GSW’s 40 journals will be delivered in an XML environment supported by HighWire’s Open Platform technology. While the bulk of the platform changes are infrastructural and will be invisible to users, GSW is simultaneously releasing its new branded look and feel for the site and a powerful new suite of user tools, including Google MapsTM-enabled advanced searching.

“GeoScienceWorld’s look and features will continue to advance in step with our vision and desire to provide leadership to our community,” says Alix Vance, GSW Executive Director. “The new site reflects GSW’s enduring, cooperative commitment to advancing nonprofit earth science research and to delivering an unparalleled user experience, which is made possible by premium research content and state-of-the art technology.”

”The transition of the GeoScienceWorld sites to HighWire’s Open Platform is an exciting step for this important earth sciences research collection,” said HighWire’s Managing Director, Tom Rump. “The new platform allows the potential for innovation to match the progressive thinking of our partner, GSW. We’re excited to be able to offer a vast array of flexible possibilities for their sites, which can be unleashed immediately as the publisher envisions them.”

On the front end, the new 3-column site design greatly enhances content visibility and discoverability for users. A goal of the design is to keep users in context as they conduct their research. Behind the scenes, the new HighWire infrastructure is designed to cooperate with emerging web services and technologies, as well as to comply with proven industry standards for content delivery.

Notable improvements to the ways in which users interact with GSW’s journal content include:

About GeoScienceWorld

GeoScienceWorld is a U.S. nonprofit organization established nearly a decade ago with the vision of making earth science research easily and economically available on the Internet. The platform hosts 40 peer-reviewed geoscience journals from 26 global publishers, which are fully integrated with the American Geological Institute’s GeoRef, the premier abstracting and indexing database in the field of earth sciences. Today GSW serves millions of users annually in 19 countries.

GSW's founding organizations are: American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), American Geological Institute (AGI), Geological Society of America (GSA), Geological Society of London (GSL), Mineralogical Society of America (MSA), Society for Sedimentary Geology (SEPM), and Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG).

About HighWire Press

At the forefront of strategic scholarly publishing, HighWire Press provides digital content development and hosting solutions to the scholarly publishing community. A department of the Stanford University Libraries, HighWire has partnered with influential societies, university presses, and other publishers since 1995 to produce the definitive online versions of high-impact, peer-reviewed journals, books, reference works, and other scholarly content. The distinguished HighWire community shares ideas and innovations in publishing through regular meetings, an active discussion forum, and through the service of its highly qualified staff.

The underlying infrastructure of HighWire's electronic publishing platform is Web-services-oriented, flexible, and permeable, allowing publishers to easily layer new software and services to their sites that will meet the ever-changing needs of today's online and mobile readers.

For more information, please contact:
HighWire Press
Bonnie Zavon
Public Relations, HighWire | Stanford University

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