Northern Light and Xstracta Partner to Expand "Discovery for Life Sciences Conference Abstracts" Content and User Community

BOSTON, Dec. 11, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Northern Light® today announced a new partnership that will significantly expand the number of life sciences conference abstracts and posters currently contained within its Discovery research portal. The life sciences Discovery portal offers search and automated analysis of valuable content collections to help organizations conduct market research, technical research, and competitive intelligence.

Working with Xstracta, a company that helps associations handle and manage their scientific data, Northern Light will offer to host an association's conference content for free.   The hosted content will be made available to the association to search and link to from its own websites.  The benefit to the association of this arrangement is that it will be relieved of the cost and hassle of hosting abstracts, posters, and multi-media objects.  Also, as part of the arrangement, Northern Light will provide free access to the Discovery research portal to all of the association's members as a value-added member service. This access will be for the entire collection of abstracts and posters, not just those from the participating association. 

In exchange for the content hosting service and membership access to Discovery, Northern Light will incorporate that association's content into the commercial version of Northern Light Discovery that Northern Light licenses to its enterprise clients.  The inclusion of an association's content in Discovery will give the association the added benefits of increased visibility of its conference content to the life sciences industry and increased traffic to its website.

Northern Light and Xstracta project that their new collaboration with life sciences associations will potentially add tens of thousands of posters and other multi-media documents to the Discovery research portal. The initial group of associations participating in the Northern Light project will be announced in the first half of 2015.

Discovery's abstracts provide an abundance of life sciences research, often several years before that information is published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, if it gets published at all.   Researchers and scientists can search a full-text index of more than 1.6 million abstracts and posters from research papers delivered at over 1,500 medical conferences held since 2010, with new conferences added as the abstracts are posted.  With Discovery's robust alerting capabilities, researchers can be notified as soon as new conference content is published.

Discovery can be licensed on a seat basis, or enterprise-wide. It is available directly from Northern Light, and also from Wolters Kluwer Health on OvidSP.

All of the abstracts and posters in the Discovery portal are linked from the search results.   A researcher or scientist can click the link to see the material on the website of the conference organizer and go right to the page the abstract is on – even in a 200-page PDF containing a thousand or more abstracts.

"Access to conference abstracts was requested by our life sciences clients, because they realize the information contained in conference papers and posters can be a window into the next significant innovation," Northern Light CEO C. David Seuss said.  "Using the Discovery portal, the abstracts become even more valuable, because they can be searched collectively and analyzed instantly for key research concepts, accelerating the 'time to insight' for a researcher or scientist."

Also, Northern Light Discovery for Life Sciences Conference Abstracts contains Northern Light MI Analyst™ text analytics, which automatically analyzes documents found in search results. MI Analyst can analyze documents using industry-specific concepts and concept categories including Drugs, Diseases, Mechanisms of Action, Clinical Trials, and Proteins, as well as general business facets such as Company Names, Business Scenarios, and Strategies.

For organizations that need additional content sets and customization, Northern Light offers its SinglePoint™ Strategic Research Portals.  SinglePoint can be tailored to the look and feel of the client organization; can integrate diverse sources of internal, external, and licensed market intelligence; and can selectively populate or extract information from Microsoft SharePoint sites or other enterprise content repositories.

About Xstracta
Xstracta is a company that has its roots in the development of a number of applications for the handling and management of association's scientific data. Xstracta's goal is to be able to provide such organizations with long-term solutions for the growing amount of scientific content being made available on their website and/or at meetings. Xstracta's core product, CUPID,is a knowledge and education portal that can be layered over a society website. Xstracta also offers services for e-Posters, webcasting, open access publishing, clinical guidelines, and clinical trial databases.

About Northern Light
Northern Light has been providing strategic research portals, business research content, and search technology to global enterprises since 1996.  Northern Light's current clients include Fortune 100 market leaders in information technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, energy, financial services, transportation, retailing, and consumer products. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Northern Light has unique partnerships with more than 100 of the world's leading syndicated technology and industry research publishers, and is a charter member of the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprises at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

SOURCE Northern Light Group LLC

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