It provides simultaneous access to "deep web" scientific databases, which are typically not searchable by commercial search engines.

"One to many" and "many to one" machine translations can be performed for Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

[citation needed] WorldWideScience.org provides science search through a variety of features and abilities, including: The concept of a global gateway to national science information sources was first described by Dr. Walter Warnick at the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) annual meeting in Washington, DC, in 2006.

The concept was formalized in January 2007 when the British Library and the United States Department of Energy signed a Statement of Intent to partner in the development of a global science gateway.

The WorldWideScience Alliance has an international membership, including CISTI (Canada), ISTIC (China), VTT (Finland), INIST (France), INASP, International Nuclear Information System (INIS), TIB (Germany), JST (Japan), KISTI (Korea), Health Service Executive (HSE) (Ireland), SciELO (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Venezuela), CSIR (South Africa), British Library, Science.gov (United States), African Journals OnLine, and ICSTI.