Electronic publishing for academics: geology and physics in Russian network for natural sciences

Electronic publications have proven to be crucial for supplying the scientific community with up-todate research results and instruments for both education and research. Present work summarizes the experience of development and maintenance of two natural science oriented servers and their integration with related databases and web-resources. The Russian network for natural sciences pursues the aim of providing the scientific society of the CIS states with high quality tools for peerreviewed scientific publishing in Russian and other languages with full public availability and an open archive of handbooks and textbooks on geology and physics. Web-based software for scientific calculations, forums, various information services and an ample catalogue of related scientific resources combined with search and classification tools are also presented on the Network. Search forms for geology and physics resources freely distributed among interested third-party sites and means of mutual information exchange based on XML serve the aim of deep integration of scientific resources. Designed and launched with the support of Moscow State University in 1997 and 2000 respectively, the Geo.Web.Ru and Phys.Web.Ru servers provide users with thousands of scientific and popular books, articles and sketches on physics (over 2,200 documents) and geology (over 4,700 documents). The servers are by now among the top-ranked resources for Russian-speaking scientific auditorium according to usage statistics