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World Scientific Creates History
World Scientific has created history once again!
 It is the first publisher in Asia Pacific to form a consortium with more than 100 academic universities in China, thus facilitating Chinese researchers' on-line access to journals at a very affordable price.
World Scientific's Chairman Dr K. K Phua and Prof. Xue Fangyu, Director of Tsinghua University Library which was responsible for bringing together the consortium of libraries, inked the agreement at an event which marked the formation of the WorldSciNet China Consortium. Mr. Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Acting Minister for Education kindly officiated at the event held on February 18. His Excellency Zhang Jiuhuan, Ambassador of the People's Republic of China to Singapore, also witnessed the signing.
Said Mr. Tharman Shanmugaratnam: "The formation of this Consortium is one of many such international linkages that are springing up between Chinese universities and the global academic community. Even as international institutions seek greater access to the wealth of ideas and expertise in China, so, too, Chinese institutions are looking outwards to seek new partners in knowledge creation.
"This is part of the worldwide trend among leading universities to stay relevant to an increasingly globalised economic community. All over the world, leading universities are looking beyond their own country and traditional areas of focus."
Over the past year, World Scientific has indeed been actively promoting its electronic journals to the Chinese academic libraries and overcame longstanding connectivity problem with the Mainland. For a start, 58 of World Scientific's electronic journals covering various disciplines will be made available to the group of Chinese universities. The international publisher hopes to make the entire collection ubitiquous in the whole of China by next year. This will soon be followed by the provision of all of the 90 journals that it publishes.
 Said Dr Phua: "We believe in helping learning organisations to continually improve their quality, scale, and breadth. Only then can we realise our dream of promoting knowledge acquisition as a part of everyday life, making it accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time and in various disciplines."
World Scientific has been publishing STM (scientific, technical and medical) journals since 1986. Many of its journals boast well-known editorial board members and put on outstanding performances in ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) Impact Factor. The factor determines the relative importance of journals within their subject categories through indicators such as the frequency of journal articles cited.
Dr Phua added that the formation of the consortium was also in tandem with the call for Singapore corporations to go beyond the island-state to create a foothold elsewhere. He has every reason to believe so, for World Scientific has successfully made its presence felt beyond Singapore. It is the largest academic publisher in the Asia-Pacific region, and one of the largest in the world - in the likes of international academic publishers like Elsevier, Springer-Verlag, Cambridge University Press and Kluwer.
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