Eric Tomlinson, co-founder of TheScientificWorld.com and continuing CEO, said: "We believe this merger uniquely positions us to offer the world's 5 million scientists what they need—but cannot get—from any other single source: an integrated suite of scientific information, products, and services designed to enhance and to accelerate their research activities."

John Rodman, co-founder, president, and former CEO of ScienceWise, now becomes president of the ScienceWise division at TheScientificWorld, Inc. He said: "In addition to allowing online access to one of the world's largest aggregations of scientific and medical literature, users also will receive intelligence alerts to the latest scientific and clinical research findings, news, and research-funding opportunities. Additionally, users will also shortly be able to access online details of the very latest methods and protocols seamlessly integrated with the scientific literature and equipment, chemicals, and biological resources necessary to perform a critical technique."

TheScientificWorld offers a range of online services: TheScientificWorldJOURNAL, an online journal for the life and environmental sciences covering some 100 scientific domains; newsLAB with news, feature articles, and editorial content in over 200 subject categories from which users can create a personal news page; pupALERT, which provides customized alerts (personal user profiles = pup) covering publications, meeting announcements, and news; and labSHELF (formerly scienceWAREHOUSE), a purchasing service for over 400,000 cataloged scientific supplies and equipment through an arrangement with Fisher Scientific International, Inc. and other specialized suppliers of biological resources.

The key new addition to TheScientificWorld following the acquisition of ScienceWise is proposalCENTRAL, a Web-based application for submitting and reviewing research funding proposals that encompasses many government, not-for-profit, and corporate R&D funding sources. It adds some 200-250 funding opportunity listings weekly, and taps online sources such as the Commerce Business Daily, NIH Guide, Federal Register, and NSF Bulletin; 160 federal, state, and local government agencies; 700 U.S. foundations and other nonprofits; and 300 R&D corporations.

ScienceWise has a number of other services. Tomlinson told me that all the products would continue, but that they might change names as they were integrated into TheScientificWorld services. Other ScienceWise products include a Collaboratory service as a secure "virtual project" workspace with a range of tools for distributed work teams, including online meeting tools, scientific software, document-sharing tools, and specialized online forums; a Grants Keyword Thesaurus; a Global Technology Index (GTI), which indexes technologies available for licensing from every government and university research facility in the U.S. and Canada as well as select laboratories in Europe and Asia; NetWise, a meta-site collection of Web links in science and engineering; Beyond Discovery, a series of case studies on the origins of important technological and medical advances written by professional science writers; and Journal Tracker, an e-mail, table-of-contents alerting service from ISI. ScienceWise's "Career" service had been discontinued before the acquisition. It had relied primarily on TheScientificWorld for supplying journal literature to its members.

The e-mail alerting services required ScienceWise users to register and pay approximately $100 a year for funding alert announcements. Tomlinson indicated that journal article notification, offered by TheScientificWorld, would stay free, but that the company planned to offer a number of "premium" alerting services over the next 7 months.

Merging the operations of the two concerns should be completed before the end of the year. The merged company has more than 60 employees, with headquarters in Boynton Beach, Florida, and offices in Washington, DC, and Oxford, U.K. Rodman and David Guthrie of Fuqua Ventures will join the board of directors of TheScientificWorld, Inc. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

TheScientificWorld also continues to expand its sciBASE megabase collection of citations to a full range of scientific and technical published literature. A recent agreement with the British Library has added 4 million citations to papers and abstracts published from 100,000 conferences dating back to 1993. Over the last 12 months, sciBASE has more than doubled its content; it now includes some 30 million citations. Its collection of full-text articles has also increased. A recent arrangement with IOS Press has added articles dating back to January 1998 from 30 journals, including such titles as Disease Markers, In Silico Biology, and Scientific Programming. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) now supplies sciBASE with articles (starting in 2001) that were published in Pure and Applied Chemistry.

Anita Crafts-Lighty, vice president of sciBASE, said: "The addition of nearly 4 million conference citations from The British Library to sciBASE, and the recent addition of approximately 9 million bibliographic records from the PASCAL INIST-CNRS database, are important milestones for our company. The conference data are particularly valuable because, until now, there have been very few freely available options whereby scientists could locate abstracts or papers from a conference that they did not attend. Today, those documents can be located and purchased through sciBASE with just a few mouse-clicks and scientists can also receive regular alerts to such items as they are published." The conference coverage already available on sciBASE includes worldMEET, a searchable database listing some 4,000 conferences recently held or scheduled through 2009.

The sciBASE FAQ page links to an Excel file that lists all 30,000-plus journals covered in the service with a separate list of the 500 sciBASE journals for which users can download full-text articles in Adobe PDF format. Currently, publishers participating in the full-text delivery service include, besides IOS Press and IUPAC, Blackwell Science (including Munksgaard), Taylor and Francis (including Carfax and other imprints), and Mary Ann Liebert. TheScientificWorld plans to add more content sources soon.

Citations in sciBASE go back to 1965, and some 10,000 new citations are added daily. Sources for the citations include the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE, The British Library, BIOSIS, CAB Abstracts, and PASCAL from INIST-CNRS. Searching the citations in sciBASE is free, with credit card and deposit account (worldACCOUNTS) options for purchasing articles and other material. Article costs vary depending on publisher and copyright holder, but the system displays basic fees in the search results. Users do not need to subscribe to a journal to receive a copy of an article. Standard delivery times run 24-48 hours with a 2-4 hour rush delivery service. An extra $3 charge applies to fax or rush deliveries. Some of the articles come through an arrangement with the British Library Document Supply Centre and arrive as Ariel TIFF files attached to e-mail messages.

Search features include Boolean connectors, truncation, author field searches, nesting, etc. The alerting service is also free, though it does require registration of course.