ICONEX. Funded by the UK-based Joint Information Systems Council with the aim of facilitating the development and brokerage of interactive, interoperable, learning objects through establishing a standards-based repository.

www.iconex.hull.ac.uk

Learning Objects Network (LON). An Internet infrastructure company established to service the needs of a broad range of stakeholders engaged in standards-based development and packaging of learning objects. Stakeholders include publishers, corporations, the military, medical information providers, and training and education providers.

www.learningobjectsnetwork.com

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning & Online Teaching (MERLOT). Initiated in the United States, MERLOT is now an international cooperative with a primary aim of providing a free and open repository of high-quality learning resources suitable for faculty and students in higher education. It achieves this through a subscription-based membership and through leveraging the academic tradition of peer review.

www.merlot.org

Resource Discovery Network (RDN). A collaboration of over sixty UK-based educational and research organizations, including the Natural History Museum and the British Library. It provides free resource discovery services that access a wide range of quality online resource collections organized according to academic discipline areas.

www.rdn.ac.uk

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). An alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations focused on facilitating the optimum dissemination of scholarly output in the networked digital environment. It achieves this through incubation of innovative and cost-effective mechanisms of distribution and ongoing public advocacy for changes in the culture of scholarly communication and the systems that support it.

www.arl.org/sparc

Science Museums of China (SMC). The Science Museums of China (SMC) has been established with support from the Chinese Academy of Sciences to be a comprehensive Web site for "cherishing the goals of spreading scientific knowledge, advocating scientific methodology, and carrying forward scientific spirit." SMC is made up of a cluster of virtual science museums covering a range of disciplines.

www.kepu.com.cn/english/ index.html