Elsevier launches free science definitions service

Publishing giant Elsevier is launching a new service that provides encyclopedia-style entries on key scientific topics. Previously, researchers reading journal articles on the Dutch company's ScienceDirect platform would have had to leave the site if they wished to find basic information about a term or concept – with many likely to end up on Wikipedia, the free, community-curated online encyclopedia. Now Elsevier is hoping to keep researchers on its platform with the launch of a free layer of content called ScienceDirect Topics, offering an initial 80,000 pages of material relating to the life sciences, biomedical sciences and neuroscience. Each offers a quick definition of a key term or topic, details of related terms and relevant excerpts from Elsevier books. Significantly, this content is not written to order but is extracted from Elsevier's books, in a process that Sumita Singh, managing director of Elsevier Reference Solutions, described as "completely automated, algorithmically generated and machine-learning based".