SAN LEANDRO, California —March 29, 2004— MDL Information Systems, Inc., an Elsevier company, has announced availability of its premier Web-based research platform to the academic community. DiscoveryGate(sm), the structure-searchable resource for scientific information that has become a first stop for corporate scientists, is now open to students, faculty, and academic researchers worldwide.

"MDL is proud to make this resource available and affordable to the academic community," said MDL CEO Bernard Aleva. "DiscoveryGate is unparalleled in its delivery of integrated, indexed content from Elsevier and MDL and other content providers including Thomson Derwent, Prous, FIZ Chemie, Springer, and Wiley."

Academic researchers can now access 14 databases such as CrossFire Beilstein, MDL® Available Chemicals Directory, MDL® Drug Data Report, and MDL® Toxicity, authoritative reference works, and links to over 20,000 journal titles (additional licenses required to access third-party content in their environments).

DiscoveryGate does not merely provide author abstracts and indexed text records, but richly-excerpted information from the areas of chemistry, synthesis, ADME, toxicology, and pharmacology. With DiscoveryGate's integration and linking of content, researchers can quickly compare results and information not available through other systems. DiscoveryGate gives researchers access to more than 13 million chemical structures, 10 million reactions, and over 200 million associated calculated and reported properties, including synthesis, bioactivity, metabolism, toxicology, and physical property data.

DiscoveryGate for academia (gateway.discoverygate.com) features a campus-wide access model: When an institution licenses DiscoveryGate, any number of eligible faculty members, students, or researchers at the institution may simultaneously use it—access is not limited to a few people at a time.

"This is a tremendous boost for librarians, chemistry students, and faculty researchers," said Tim Hoctor, product manager for MDL. "The system is affordable for institutions, management is simple, and availability to researchers is assured."

With the new DiscoveryGate offering to academia, researchers can access structures and data with a simple query, perform structure-based clustering of results sets, quickly acquire a summary view of relevant data, and easily generate standardized reports. For an interactive tour of DiscoveryGate visit www.discoverygate.com.

MDL is a wholly owned subsidiary of Elsevier and its products and services are part of Elsevier's life sciences portfolio. This portfolio combines extensive MDL informatics, database, workflow, and decision support solutions with Elsevier's 400 chemistry and life science journals and related products—accelerating the discovery and development of innovative and successful new drugs by improving the speed and quality of scientists' decision making.

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, the company publishes more than 1,800 journals and 2,200 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, online reference works and subject-specific portals. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc, a world-leading publisher and information provider. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).