Amsterdam (OBBeC) - Elsevier has announced a new partnership agreement with NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data to enrich ScienceDirect content.

According to the announcement, this agreement allows for an integration of NextBio’s unique set of ontology-based semantic tools and a compilation of high quality sources of public data on ScienceDirect, providing health science, life science and chemistry researchers with a dynamic platform to improve discoverability and research productivity.

While most scientific information on genes, pathways, diseases, tissues and compounds is available online, it currently resides in various, disconnected, locations. Enhancing ScienceDirect with NextBio’s biomedical ontology framework enables life sciences, health sciences and chemistry researchers to analyze ScienceDirect content and search ScienceDirect peer-reviewed literature together with publicly available research data from PubMed, clinical trials, experimental data, and news articles, on one single platform. The new enhancement will become available on ScienceDirect and accessible to subscribed users in summer 2009.

“ScienceDirect plays a crucial role in researchers’ workflow.” explained Rafael Sidi, Vice President, Product Management, ScienceDirect. “We continuously seek new ways to help accelerate science by increasing research productivity and efficiency. Partnering with NextBio will help further this mission by allowing us to provide intelligent and insightful information and smarter content to help researchers do research better.

Researchers at Stanford Genome Technology Center use ScienceDirect to enhance and accelerate their life sciences research efforts," said Dr. Baback Gharizadeh, Research Scientist at Stanford University. "We are excited about ScienceDirect leveraging NextBio’s technology to explore literature findings within the context of public experimental data and related basic and clinical research. Its unique content and the ability to test new hypotheses provide the next logical step in exploiting published studies."

“We are excited to be working with the world’s largest science, technology and medical publisher,” said Saeid Akhtari, Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer, of NextBio. “Combining the depth of our search and discovery capabilities, and our unique content with the breath of the ScienceDirect platform will create new opportunities for Life Sciences, Health Sciences and Chemistry researchers to quickly gain access to the most current and comprehensive insight in their field.”