Philadelphia, Albuquerque, & Stanford – February 3, 2011

The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) has selected Access Innovations as its semantics partner to enhance the discoverability of journal content on the HighWire platform as well as across the AACR organization. Leveraging Access Innovations’ proven experience and their highly effective semantic tagging and indexing tools, the AACR will enable their readers and members to make connections between and among related information currently residing in disparate websites. 

HighWire has actively supported semantic tagging for years using a HighWire-developed taxonomy* and selected classification tools, both within the HighWire Portal and on individual publication sites. “As part of our mission to work collaboratively with our publishing partners, we have organized a Semantic Enrichment Working Group,” noted Kristen Fisher Ratan, Associate Director for Strategic Development at HighWire. “Composed of HighWire-affiliated publishers, including the AACR, this group gives them a unique opportunity to discuss possible use cases for semantic enrichment and to make independent, informed decisions about the semantic vendor they wish to engage. HighWire will be proactively assisting publishers in implementing their semantics solution of choice on their HighWire sites.” 

“We are thrilled to be working with Access Innovations to develop an AACR taxonomy that can be applied to our content, and with HighWire Press to allow us to present related articles across our journals,” said Diane Scott-Lichter, publisher of the AACR suite of journals. “We expect to expand these efforts to include semantic tagging of other AACR information such as meetings, workshops, conferences, grants, job postings, podcasts, and working groups as a second phase to this project. Making links between related items will drive increased targeted serendipity, providing improved access to the critical information users need.” 

“Access Innovations has been growing and fine-tuning its Data Harmony software line since 1997,” noted Marjorie Hlava, President, Chairman, and founder of Access Innovations, Inc. “We are proud to be working with the AACR and its publications and with HighWire’s world class platform.” The Access Innovations suite of software products is composed of several modules, designed to simplify the management of databases or text collections, with support for editorial processes and to provide significant semantic enrichment. Access Innovations’ products adhere to all NISO, ISO and W3C standards, including XML, and are written in Java, providing platform independence for all users.

*The HighWire taxonomy was developed by subject matter experts over many years. It contains over 50,000 nodes and is particularly well-developed in the medical and life sciences areas. The indexing rules dictate exactly how terms are assigned to content. These rules represent significant intellectual property for HighWire and could be utilized with other classification tools. The semantic enrichment is stored by HighWire and is available for publishers to experiment with or use in whatever way is desired.

About the AACR
The mission of the American Association for Cancer Research is to prevent and cure cancer. Founded in 1907, the AACR is the world’s oldest and largest professional organization dedicated to advancing cancer research. The membership includes 33,000 basic, translational and clinical researchers; health care professionals; and cancer survivors and advocates in the United States and more than 90 other countries. The AACR marshals the full spectrum of expertise from the cancer community to accelerate progress in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer through high-quality scientific and educational programs. It funds innovative, meritorious research grants, research fellowships and career development awards. The AACR Annual Meeting attracts more than 18,000 participants who share the latest discoveries and developments in the field. Special conferences throughout the year present novel data across a wide variety of topics in cancer research, treatment and patient care. Including Cancer Discovery, the AACR publishes seven major peer-reviewed journals: Cancer Research; Clinical Cancer Research; Molecular Cancer Therapeutics; Molecular Cancer Research; Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention; and Cancer Prevention Research. AACR journals represented 20 percent of the market share of total citations in 2009. The AACR also publishes CR, a magazine for cancer survivors and their families, patient advocates, physicians and scientists. http://www.aacr.org/

About Access Innovations
Access Innovations has extensive experience with Internet technology applications, master data management, database creation, thesaurus/taxonomy creation, and semantic integration. The Access Innovations Data Harmony software includes automatic indexing, thesaurus management, an XML Intranet System (XIS), and metadata extraction for content creation developed to meet production environment needs. Data Harmony is used by publishers, governments, and corporate clients throughout the world. www.accessinn.com, www.dataharmony.com, www.taxodiary.com  

 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 division 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 readers. http://highwire.stanford.edu