The International DOI Foundation and Wanfang Data, an affiliate of the Chinese Ministry of Science & Technology, have announced the launch of a Chinese DOI^® Registration Agency with immediate effect.

Wanfang Data will collaborate with The Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) in the management and development of the DOI Registration Agency. The agency will focus on the development of a Chinese language platform and gateway for DOI^® name use. Wanfang Data and ISTIC will offer additional services using the DOI^® System, building on their well-established position as information integrators. Two initial areas of development will be the development of linking services for Chinese journals, and management of scientific data sets in China: for each of these applications Wanfang Data and ISTIC will collaborate with existing DOI Registration Agencies dealing with these sectors outside China.

Wanfang Data provides a gateway to information on Chinese science, technology. medicine, business, and culture; it has been the leading information provider in China since the 1990s. Wanfang Data was incorporated in 2000 with ISTIC as its largest shareholder, offering academic institutions worldwide a service for Chinese digital resources, such as journals, dissertations, conference proceedings and business information. Wanfang Data has over 700 employees, offices in major cities in mainland China, Hong Kong and North America, and has the largest data production centre in China.

The Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, under the leadership of the Ministry of Science and Technology, was established in 1956 and is the first and largest information institution in China. The mission of ISTIC is to provide scientific and technical information services to the public and government agencies. With a wide range of database resources and value-added services, ISTIC provides collection, storage and service of scientific and technological documents, database building, information analysis and research, information service network infrastructure construction, information professionals training and media publishing. ISTIC also shoulders the important task of building and developing the National Engineering and Technology Library.

The decision to develop a joint ISTIC and Wanfang Data collaboration to jointly become a DOI RA was taken on the basis that this would help encourage a strong commitment to the DOI System with existing Chinese customers and open potential applications from other working partners.

It is expected that Wanfang Data and ISTIC will promote DOI name application in China through the cooperation with other major Chinese players in the industry, including, but not limited to the National Library, CALIS (the major library consortium) and China Science Library.

It is also expected that this activity will also benefit from related applications such as the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) deployment of Handle System^® technology. CNNIC is China's domain name registry as operator and administrator of the ".cn" country code top level domain (ccTLD) and Chinese Domain Name (CDN) system; it has developed a Handle-DNS integration system which will result in a deployment of integrated Handle-DNS through the .cn domain. The International DOI Foundation's DOI System is also a Handle System implementation.

For further information:

• Wanfang Data: http://www.WanfangData.com/
• Institute of Scientific & Technological Information of China (ISTIC): http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/index_en.html
• DOI System: http://www.doi.org/
• Presentations from Europe-China Conference on Intellectual Property in Digital Media, 18-20 October 2006, and 1st International Symposium on Cooperation and Promotion of Information Resources in Science and Technology, Beijing, China, 22-23 October 2006: http://www.doi.org/announce.html

Press contacts:

Norman Paskin, International DOI Foundation
n.paskin@doi.org
tel +44 1865 314033

Zhang Xu, Wangfang Data
zhangxu@wanfangdata.com.cn
tel +86 (010) 88018259