Torii, an Open Portal over Open Archives

The world of academic publishing is undergoing many changes. Everywhere paper-based publishing is being replaced by electronic archives and ink printing by bits. Unrestricted (web) access to many resources is becoming a fundamental feature of the academic research environment. Particularly in the high-energy physics community, the pre-print distribution has moved completely away from the paper-based system into a fully electronic system based on open archives. At the same time, freely accessible peer-reviewed journals have started to challenge the more traditional, and paper-based journals showing that the entire paper-based cycle can be effectively replaced by a web-based one. The TIPS project was born in this environment and from these observations. It is based on the idea that further progress in information distribution and scientific publishing on the web requires some key ingredients: the implementation of a more extensive semantic structure in the documents that are exchanged; a unified, desktop-like, web access to different archives, journals and services to manage information; the availability of better information retrieval and filtering techniques. TIPS is part of the European Union Fifth Framework Program Information Society Technologies Program: IST-1999-10419, and its first implementation is a portal named torii. At present, torii is undergoing an evaluation phase, so it is available only for a restricted test user group.