The Optical Society of America in Washington has joined 12 other scientific, engineering and technological societies to create a comprehensive online research site that will allow access to their collective contents, some 3 million articles spanning 150 years of scholarship.

The scitopia.org site will be available in June. The free federated vertical search portal will allow users to explore patents and the research most often cited in scholarly work.

The societies involved in the project include: the American Geophysical Union, American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, American Society of Civil Engineers, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Electrochemical Society, IEEE, Institute of Physics Publishing, Optical Society of America, SPIE, Society of Automotive Engineers and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Other organizations will be invited to join the project as it progresses.

The site is intended to foster the spread of information by providing researchers with a search engine focused on technological advancements. Users will be able to search for articles using a fielded approach with, for example, the author’s name or the article’s title.

Researchers at institutions with subscriptions to the content will be able to gain access to an article’s full text. Members of partner societies also may be able to access the full text, depending upon the association’s membership policies. A pay-per-view option also will be available.

Because scitopia.org is a federated search portal, existing subscribers to member organizations will automatically gain access to the new Web site.