SPIE announces partnership with global open-knowledge platform The Lens

18 Nov 2020

The Lens’s open data to be fully integrated into SPIE’s Digital Library platform.

SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, and publisher of optics.org. is pleased to announce a partnership with the open-knowledge platform, The Lens, a robust and comprehensive resource of linked datasets of scholarly and patent works run by Cambia, an established social enterprise.

Under the agreement, all scholarly citation and patent citation data for SPIE publications curated by The Lens will be integrated into SPIE Digital Library and available to readers.

The SPIE Digital Library, the world’s largest collection of optics and photonics applied research, comprises more than 500,000 publications which cover topical areas ranging from biomedical optics and neuroscience, to physics and astronomy-related technology.

“We are excited to partner with The Lens to highlight the notable impact SPIE authors have had on both scholarly research and inventive enterprise,” said SPIE Director of Publications and Platform Patrick Franzen.

'Better communications'

“Integrating this data into the SPIE Digital Library will allow us to better communicate the impact of our publications. But importantly and uniquely, it helps researchers and practitioners in industry to find each other to build productive partnerships to see the research delivered to the public as real-world outcomes.”

“The team at Lens.org is pleased to partner with SPIE to enhance the SPIE Digital Library with dynamic scholarly and patent citations with links to the underlying open records,” said Cambia’s CEO and Executive Director of The Lens Richard Jefferson.

“Research published in SPIE journals has outsized impact on real-world outcomes, as seen by its influence in the patent literature. This will be valuable to users of the SPIE Digital Library who will be able to trace these relationships and see how research findings enable innovation and product development, and to explore potential sponsors or users of their work.”

Citation data, including links to the underlying open data from The Lens, will be available in the SPIE Digital Library later this year.

About the partners

The Lens makes critical knowledge openly available to policy makers, researchers, librarians, tech transfer offices, investors and funders, publishers, law firms, inventive companies, and many others.

The Lens hosts and serves discovery, analytics, metrics, and management tools across a massive corpus of scholarly literature and patents linked through citations on an open, verifiable, and privacy-assured platform.

SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, an educational not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based science, engineering, and technology.

It serves more than 258,000 constituents from 184 countries, offering conferences and their published proceedings, continuing education, books, journals, and the SPIE Digital Library.

In 2020, SPIE provided over $5.8 million in community support including scholarships and awards, outreach and advocacy programs, travel grants, public policy, and educational resources.