The website, which comprises an up-to-date searchable database of ad specifications, will launch in the UK on 4 November with the majority of UK newspaper publishers already onboard.

Guardian News and Media and Trinity Mirror have both signed up on an exclusive basis, meaning that Specle.net will be the only place that advertisers can find online specifications for their newspapers.

Meanwhile, Telegraph Media Group, Financial Times, Associated Newspapers, Independent News & Media and Evening Standard, parent ES London will also include specifications for all their titles on www.specle.net.

Specle managing director Tom Beckenham said that the service would make it easier for publishers to "communicate information that was previously complex to explain and near impossible to keep up-to-date".

It gives publishers the ability to graphically display technical requirements so that creative agencies, pre-press companies and advertisers can quickly select and validate magazine or newspaper ad sizes and other information in real-time.

He added: "We've removed the barriers for entry for publishers by giving them a great website, at no cost, that they can use to maintain all their own info."

Publishers will be able to send links to their current information out to the whole adertising supply chain via their own branded URL.

The website, which was initially launched in Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) in August, has already attracted more than 95% of publishers in that region.

The company is currently in talks with a number of other major UK publishing houses and hopes to have "the overwhelming majority" of UK publishers online by early 2010.

Beckenham added that the company would roll out its web-based service across Europe over the next few months, with the aim of becoming the "international de-facto standard for the online sourcing of ad technical specifications for printed newspapers and magazines".