AMSTERDAM, June 12 /PRNewswire/ --

- Improving Research Discoverability and Productivity

Elsevier today announced a new partnership agreement with NextBio, provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data to enrich ScienceDirect content. This agreement allows for an integration of NextBio's unique set of ontology-based semantic tools and a compilation of high quality sources of public data on ScienceDirect, providing health science, life science and chemistry researchers with a dynamic platform to improve discoverability and research productivity.

While most scientific information on genes, pathways, diseases, tissues and compounds is available online, it currently resides in various, disconnected, locations. Enhancing ScienceDirect with NextBio's biomedical ontology framework enables life sciences, health sciences and chemistry researchers to analyze ScienceDirect content and search ScienceDirect peer-reviewed literature together with publicly available research data from PubMed, clinical trials, experimental data, and news articles, on one single platform. The new enhancement will become available on ScienceDirect and accessible to subscribed users in summer 2009.

ScienceDirect plays a crucial role in researchers' workflow. explained Rafael Sidi, Vice President, Product Management, ScienceDirect. We continuously seek new ways to help accelerate science by increasing research productivity and efficiency. Partnering with NextBio will help further this mission by allowing us to provide intelligent and insightful information and smarter content to help researchers do research better.

Researchers at Stanford Genome Technology Center use ScienceDirect to enhance and accelerate their life sciences research efforts, said Dr. Baback Gharizadeh, Research Scientist at Stanford University. We are excited about ScienceDirect leveraging NextBio's technology to explore literature findings within the context of public experimental data and related basic and clinical research. Its unique content and the ability to test new hypotheses provide the next logical step in exploiting published studies.

We are excited to be working with the world's largest science, technology and medical publisher, said Saeid Akhtari, Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer, of NextBio. Combining the depth of our search and discovery capabilities, and our unique content with the breath of the ScienceDirect platform will create new opportunities for Life Sciences, Health Sciences and Chemistry researchers to quickly gain access to the most current and comprehensive insight in their field.

About NextBio

NextBio is the provider of an innovative platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data. NextBio's platform seamlessly combines powerful tools with unique correlated content to transform information into knowledge, providing the foundation for new scientific discoveries. NextBio helps organizations increase productivity and dramatically improve collaboration across therapeutic groups and geographic boundaries. NextBio is delivered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution resulting in quick deployment and rapid return on investment.

Today, NextBio is used by over a million researchers at the world's top commercial and academic institutions. NextBio's enterprise solution has been deployed at Burnham Institute for Medical Research, Celgene, Eli Lilly, Genzyme, Johnson Johnson, Merck, Regeneron, Scripps Research Institute, Stanford University, and Takeda, among many others. To learn more about NextBio, please visit http://www.nextbio.com.

About ScienceDirect

Over a quarter of the world's full text scientific, technical and medical (STM) peer-reviewed articles - managed by renowned editors, written by respected authors and read by researchers from around the globe - are available in one place: ScienceDirect.

Elsevier's extensive and unique full-text collection covers authoritative titles from the core scientific literature including high impact factor titles such as THE LANCET, Cell and Tetrahedron. Over nine million articles are available online, including Articles in Press which offer online access to recently accepted manuscripts. The critical mass of trusted information available on ScienceDirect is unsurpassed. Coverage includes over 2,500 journals published by Elsevier and dynamic linking to journals from approximately 2,000 STM publishers through CrossRef. An expanding program of online major reference works, handbooks, book series and over 4,400 eBooks in all fields of science seamlessly interlinks with primary research referenced in journal articles.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier's 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com/), MD Consult ( http://www.mdconsult.com/), Scopus (http://www.info.scopus.com/), bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com/) is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc (http://www.reedelsevier.com/), a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

For more information, see http://www.elsevier.com

Contact: Malkie Bernheim/Jessica Disch Padilla Speer Beardsley +1-212-752-8338 mbernheim@psbpr.com/jdisch@psbpr.com

Contact: Malkie Bernheim/Jessica Disch, Padilla Speer Beardsley, +1-212-752-8338, mbernheim@psbpr.com/jdisch@psbpr.com