A recent agreement between FIZ Karlsruhe and Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) strengthens a partnership that began in 1983 with the foundation of STN InternationalSM, the online service for patent and research information. In the future, FIZ Karlsruhe will also now be a significant contributor to the production of the chemistry database, Chemical AbstractsSM (CA), and a partner in improved customer support for those databases on the STN online system.
The recently concluded collaboration agreements cover two new areas: indexing of scientific literature for CAS databases; and customer training and support for CAS databases on STN.
Beginning January 2010, a team of scientists at FIZ Karlsruhe will perform value-added indexing of selected literature documents, according to the conventions used by CAS to make the information accessible within the CAS databases.
FIZ Karlsruhe has acquired its expertise and experience to manage and perform this function in the course of more than three decades as a producer of sci-tech databases.
In this regard, FIZ Karlsruhe joins a global network of scientists whose expertise contributes to CAS database building. Teams of scientists in Ohio, India, China, Japan and elsewhere constitute the principal contributors to this more than 100 year-old resource.
At the same time, FIZ Karlsruhe will assume additional responsibilities in marketing of the CAS databases. FIZ Karlsruhe's experts will provide training and support to STN customers in all German-speaking countries.
'We are happy to extend our successful collaborations with CAS to two further business-critical areas,' says Sabine Brünger-Weilandt, president and CEO of FIZ Karlsruhe. 'By this, we significantly strengthen our most important international partnership, and we secure jobs for scientists within the German information infrastructure, especially within the Leibniz Association.'
Robert J Massie, president of CAS, commented: 'As the amount and complexity of publicly disclosed chemical information continue to grow, we are fortunate that we could turn to FIZ Karlsruhe and extend our partnership to include aspects of CAS database production. Further consolidation of our customer support activities will strengthen STN's already high reputation for providing expert assistance and training in Europe.'