The current issue of The Institute features; a collaborative project between the IEEE Signal Processing Society and Connexions to deliver free, up-to-date and reviewed technical information.

I’ve looked briefly at Connexions before, bookmarked it and mostly forgot about it. Having a quick look again yesterday turned up a huge amount of information, some of it directly related to my current project at work. However, there may be too much information. With so many sources, it is hard to filter through to a single document to select. The benefit of this project may not be new information, but rather pre-filtered information.

A lot of the research work that I do involves tracing through citations of papers I have for papers I need. Google Scholar is an important tool for me, but I find that most of what I’m looking for goes back to IEEE Xplore. Most older papers fall outside my subscription set¹, which leaves me abusing our corporate subscription. Ideally, many of these fundamental papers will be translated into summary papers, allowing free access and quick study before returning to the research paper at hand.

I’ll need to spend more time looking through what’s available before coming to any proper conclusion. The submission and review process was set to start at the beginning of 2008. A current search for IEEE on Connexions gives 86 results, very few of which appear to be the result of this project, but that number should start growing shortly. For the moment, I have another source to search through before I push our Xplore corporate account closer to the annual quota.

¹ This is because digital access to publications are by journal name, but many journals have changed name or have since become more specific in scope.