Brian A. Hitson, Director
Director of OSTI: Brian A. Hitson
Brian A. Hitson is Director of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), a DOE corporate function that is managed by the Office of Science. OSTI fulfills agency-wide responsibilities to collect, preserve, and disseminate scientific and technical information emanating from DOE research and development (R&D) activities.
Mr. Hitson joined OSTI in 1988 and led a range of programmatic and administrative activities, including strategic planning, budget formulation and execution, information product development, and cost-reimbursable project management. Appointed Associate Director for Administration and Information Services in 1999, he developed and implemented a number of strategic initiatives and managed line responsibilities in international information exchange programs, administrative and financial management, classified and sensitive information programs, and the digitization and preservation of a 1.2 million scientific document repository.
Mr. Hitson was appointed Director of OSTI in September 2014. As the senior official at OSTI's facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, he is the site manager for a 134,000 square foot building, which contains DOE's historic collection of unclassified, sensitive, and classified R&D results and a modern IT infrastructure serving over 400 million web transactions per year.
Mr. Hitson co-authored the 2014 DOE Public Access Plan, developing a strategy for implementing public access to the scholarly publications resulting from DOE’s R&D efforts, and, along with DOE, Office of Science, and OSTI colleagues, he led the August 2014 launch of the DOE Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science, or DOE PAGES. He also led development of the “Bringing Science to the Desktop” strategic concept, culminating in the 2013 launch of the National Library of EnergyBeta, a gateway to information across DOE, and he spearheaded OSTI’s work in multimedia information access, leading to the 2011 launch of ScienceCinema, a unique speech-indexed search engine for DOE and CERN scientific video collections. In managing OSTI's international activities, Mr. Hitson played a key role in the development of WorldWideScience.org and in the establishment of the WorldWideScience Alliance in 2008. He is the U.S. representative to the IAEA's International Nuclear Information System (INIS) and chairs the technical activities committee of the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information.
Mr. Hitson has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and a Master's in Business Administration, both from the University of Tennessee, and is a 2011 graduate of the Federal Executive Institute's Leadership for a Democratic Society program. He and his wife Mary Helen have two daughters and reside in Clinton, Tennessee.
