OSTI, US Dept of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information | Speeding access to science information from DOE and Beyond

Department of Energy and CHORUS Formalize Agreement Promoting Public Access to Scientific Publications Resulting from DOE-Funded Research

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Partnership Complements Long-Established DOE System for Collecting DOE R&D Results

In August 2014, the Department of Energy (DOE) launched the DOE Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science^Beta (DOE PAGES^Beta), a web-based portal designed to provide free public access to peer-reviewed accepted manuscripts or published scientific journal articles resulting from DOE-funded research within 12 months of publication. DOE PAGES^Beta represents DOE’s response to a February 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum calling on federal agencies to develop and implement plans to provide public access to the results of research they fund, and it leverages DOE’s long-established infrastructure and systems for managing scientific and technical information (STI). To complement the DOE-supplied content, DOE PAGES^Beta also includes a pilot collaboration with the publisher consortium CHORUS, or the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States.

Now, following a successful pilot, DOE and CHORUS have reached agreement to put their partnership into production, enabling DOE PAGES^Beta to provide accepted manuscripts submitted by DOE-funded authors as well as manuscripts and articles provided by publishers going forward.

“Recently, DOE signed an agreement with CHORUS describing the actions each will take to ensure greater public access and fulfill OSTP requirements,” Dr. Jeffrey Salmon, Deputy Director for Resource Management in the DOE Office of Science, wrote in an OSTIblog. “… Formalizing this collaboration can only propel our acquisition process leading to more comprehensive coverage of the landscape of articles.”

The DOE public access tool was developed and is maintained by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), a unit of the DOE Office of Science. DOE PAGES^Beta capitalizes on the DOE Scientific and Technical Information Program infrastructure and corporate E-Link submission system for collecting, preserving, and disseminating STI to encompass accepted manuscripts. OSTI spearheads the DOE STIP network, a collaboration of STI managers and technical information officers from DOE program, field, site, and procurement offices, national laboratories, and research facilities working to ensure that the results of DOE-funded research and development (R&D) are identified, collected, archived, and made publicly available. OSTI also devised and manages E-Link, a tool long used by Departmental organizations and researchers at universities to submit metadata and full text for technical reports, conference papers, and other forms of STI. DOE-funded authors at national laboratories and grantee and other research institutions are to use this existing infrastructure to submit metadata and links to accepted manuscripts (or the full text itself) to OSTI.

When fully operational, DOE PAGES^Betawill offer free access to the best available full-text version of DOE-affiliated publications – either the accepted manuscript or the published article – after an administrative interval of 12 months. Thus, when a CHORUS publisher member provides a publicly accessible article about DOE R&D results, DOE PAGES^Beta will link to that article; if the article is not available, DOE PAGES^Beta will provide access to the corresponding accepted manuscript obtained through DOE STIP, along with other potential access links.

The OSTP memo encouraged public-private collaboration, and DOE’s engagement with CHORUS represents such a partnership. OSTI is also engaging with other stakeholder initiatives to advance public access, such as the university and research library community’s SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE).

DOE Data Explorer and OSTI’s Data ID Service: Resources for Increasing Access to DOE Scientific Digital Data

Increasingly, scientific data play an integral role in research and collaboration. There is universal recognition of this emerging importance, as evidenced by the inclusion of “digital data” in legislation and Executive branch actions. OSTI offers a data search tool and a service for registering datasets that will help DOE increase access to digital data resulting from DOE-funded scientific research.

DOE Data Explorer, which OSTI launched in 2008, is a search tool that helps users explore DOE data by identifying publicly available collections or sources of DOE-sponsored scientific research data and allowing users to retrieve individual datasets within some of those collections. All of the collections and individual datasets result from R&D funded in whole or in part by DOE; many of the collections reflect DOE funding combined with that from other agencies or the private sector. All the collections included in DOE Data Explorer can be accessed without charge, although some require password registration.

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DOE Data Explorer’s collections reach across all of DOE’s science disciplines, and they contain many forms and formats, including numeric data, interactive data maps, gene sequences, animations and simulations, figures from published papers, data plots, and more. DOE Data Explorer’s collections reside at DOE’s Data Centers and repositories at national laboratories, data centers, user facilities, colleges and universities, the websites of professional organizations, consortiums, and corporate institutions or international organizations where DOE-sponsored research is conducted.

A key component of each DOE Data Explorer collection citation is a link to the data collection on its host server. This allows users to take advantage of the highly specialized interfaces and software toolkits that have been developed specifically for many of the collections. The interfaces and toolkits provide customized ways to search data, compare sets of data, visualize data, and package it for download and re-use.

In 2011, OSTI joined DataCite to facilitate citing, accessing, and reusing publicly available scientific research datasets produced by DOE-funded researchers. DataCite is an international organization that supports data visibility, ease of data citation in scholarly publications, data preservation and future re-use, and data access and retrievability. DataCite members help achieve these goals by assigning persistent identifiers such as digital object identifiers (DOIs) to datasets.

Through OSTI’s Data ID Service, OSTI assigns DOIs to datasets submitted by DOE and its contractor or grantee researchers and registers the DOIs with DataCite to aid in citation, discovery, and retrieval. OSTI provides this free data registration service to enhance DOE’s management of this important resource. (OSTI, the only U.S. government member of DataCite, also can assign DOIs to other federal agencies’ datasets. Its current interagency clients include two U.S. Treasury Department offices, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service.)

OSTI’s Data ID Service is a useful resource for increasing access to digital data, as the DOE Public Access Plan noted: “The Department’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information can provide digital object identifiers to datasets resulting from DOE-funded research. To improve the discoverability of and attribution for datasets created and used in the course of the research, DOE encourages the citation and identification of datasets with persistent identifiers such as DOIs.”

SciTech Connect Observes Second Anniversary

SciTech Connect, the primary repository of science, technology, and engineering research information from DOE, recently observed its second anniversary.

OSTI developed and launched the SciTech Connect search tool in March 2013 to help increase access to R&D results sponsored by DOE and its predecessor agencies. SciTech Connect incorporates the contents of two of the most popular core DOE collections, and it employs an innovative semantic search tool enabling users to retrieve more relevant information. SciTech Connect is OSTI’s most-visited DOE STI resource, and its utility was recognized in the latest edition of the DOE Open Government Plan.

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SciTech Connect includes all the full-text documents and citations previously found in the Information Bridge and the Energy Citations Database. Thus, it contains more than 65 years of scientific and technical information from DOE and its predecessor agencies, plus energy-related publications of interest to DOE. SciTech Connect also searches the contents of DOE PAGES^Beta, ScienceCinema, and DOepatents, plus the datasets in DOE Data Explorer.

SciTech Connect includes technical reports, bibliographic citations, journal articles, conference papers, books, multimedia, and data sponsored by DOE through a grant, contract, cooperative agreement, or similar funding mechanism from the 1940s to today. The subject areas covered are biology and medicine; chemistry; energy storage, conversion, and utilization; engineering; environmental sciences; fission and nuclear technologies; fossil fuels; geosciences; materials; mathematics and computing; national defense; physics; power generation and distribution; and renewable energy.

The records for the early years represent a comprehensive worldwide collection of nuclear science literature. In addition to reports from the Atomic Energy Commission and other U.S. Government agencies, the collection includes numerous non-governmental publications, as well as non-U.S. and foreign language material. In the mid-1970s, the scope of the database expanded to cover all forms of energy-related STI.

There are more than 2.7 million citations, including citations to 1.5 million journal articles, 240,000 of which have digital object identifiers linking to full-text articles on publishers' websites. SciTech Connect also has more than 400,000 full-text DOE-sponsored STI reports; more than 140,000 of the reports were published prior to 1990.

SciTech Connect represents one of the largest deployments of semantic search by a Federal agency to date. Semantic search is a way to enhance search accuracy contextually. Rather than relying on search algorithms that identify a specific query term, semantic search uses more complex contextual relationships among people, places, and things. SciTech Connect employs a semantic search technique known as keyword-to-concept mapping, whereby a search term is mapped to related scientific concepts, allowing a user to retrieve results related to the search term and also to explore narrower and similar concepts.

SciTech Connect also includes a number of other features, including basic and advanced search, faceting, in-document search, word clouds, and personalization, which allows users to save searches, define alerts based on saved searches, and create and manage document libraries.

All this content and functionality has helped make SciTech Connect a go-to source for scientific and technical literature dating back to the World War II Manhattan Project. It provides scientists, researchers, and the public with easy access to OSTI’s extensive collection of citations and articles, and it documents the rich and evolving course of DOE’s research priorities.

SciTech Connect has recorded more than 3 million sessions with a total of 5,122,000 pageviews during its first two years of operations. Since the Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database were discontinued in September 2013, SciTech Connect has been responsible for the majority of the pageviews served by OSTI’s DOE products. And since the beginning of the 2014 fiscal year last October, SciTech Connect has served 2.2 million users.

SciTech Connect also represents an important contribution to open government, and indeed the DOE Open Government Plan 3.0, published in June 2014, featured SciTech Connect as a new DOE initiative to advance collaboration.

As SciTech Connect enters its third year, the collection will continue to grow as new scientific and technical information resulting from DOE research becomes available. OSTI also will continue working to make the SciTech Connect search tool as effective and easy-to-use as possible. If you’re looking for DOE R&D results, please give SciTech Connect a try, and let us know what you think.

OSTI’s Goal: Comprehensive Collections of DOE R&D Results

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OSTI’s ongoing “rebalance/refocus efforts” place renewed emphasis on STI acquisitions, comprehensiveness, and quality. A major aspect of quality in federal scientific information collections is comprehensiveness, and OSTI has rebalanced resources to support this focus. OSTI and the STIP community provide accountability and accessibility to the Department’s R&D research output, including over 40,000 items submitted just in FY 2014. For us to provide accountability for DOE R&D results, it’s imperative that our STI collections are comprehensive, which means we must have the ability to accurately measure and report STI comprehensiveness. To assure our stakeholders, such as the Office of Management and Budget, and Congress, that OSTI and STIP are capturing and accounting for all DOE R&D results, tools are being developed or improved to reliably measure comprehensiveness across various STI types. Although we may already be close to being comprehensive in some areas, our goal is to reach 100% in all areas.

Being comprehensive is important. Along with providing accountability and a historical record, being comprehensive ensures transparency of, and accessibility to, all of DOE’s research results. STI is produced in a wide variety of formats, including books/monographs, conference papers and presentations, scientific fact sheets, journal articles, patents, program documents, scientific research data, scientific and technical computer software, technical reports, theses and dissertations, and STI videos. Accessibility to the STI reduces duplication of research effort, and optimizes DOE’s research expenditures through re-use of previous research. In mathematical terms, OSTI knows the “numerator” (STI received at OSTI), and we are now working to better define the “denominator” (all STI produced by DOE researchers).

OSTI has begun developing strategies for achieving comprehensiveness with various types of STI. An early success is with patents, which gives us our first comprehensive STI format. By partnering with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), OSTI obtained a full list of DOE-related patents, based on inclusion of “Department of Energy” (and variations) in the Government Interest field. Approximately 2,500 older patents were identified that were “missing” from OSTI’s collection. Using metadata provided by USPTO, OSTI enhanced the patent records, then loaded and released these patents into its output products, including SciTech Connect and DOepatents. DOE’s full complement of patents is now available and accessible to users worldwide.

Additional methods to measure journal article comprehensiveness, and to measure compliance with public access requirements, are also being developed, along with similar tools for conference papers and presentations. OSTI will be working with DOE national labs/user facilities, field offices, and program offices to ensure all technical reports are being submitted to OSTI. Methods are also being explored for identifying gaps in coverage for other STI types (research data, software, STI videos, etc.).

“Comprehensiveness” encompasses both current and future STI, as well as backlogs of STI that may not have been submitted through normal and existing STIP channels. Tools and strategies will be tailored as needed for individual sites/offices, incorporating the full range of STI types and categories. OSTI looks forward to working with the STIP community to make our STI collections reflect the complete and comprehensive portfolio of DOE’s research output – to move toward our goal of 100%.

A Message from the OSTI Director

DOE OSTI Implements Re-organization

Sticking to Our Knitting While Meeting New Challenges
By Brian A. Hitson

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The OSTI facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee

The Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information, a unit of the Office of Science, recently completed a restructuring to fulfill agency-wide responsibilities to collect, preserve, and disseminate STI emanating from DOE R&D activities, including a new obligation to provide public access to DOE-affiliated journal articles.

The re-organization is the culmination of a year during which OSTI took steps to re-focus and re-balance our operations by devoting more resources to collecting and preserving DOE STI and to providing comprehensive access to the results of DOE R&D investments. At the same time, we streamlined our portfolio of science search tools to make it easier to find DOE’s R&D results. In August, DOE became the first federal science agency to issue a public access plan for scholarly scientific publications in response to a February 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directive, and OSTI launched DOE PAGES^Beta, a beta portal to journal articles and accepted manuscripts resulting from DOE-funded research. On October 1, we issued the OSTI 2015-2019 Strategic Plan, a roadmap for working to ensure its collections and portals reflect the complete R&D output of DOE.

As we now implement the OSTI re-organization, I’m excited about aligning our structure and people in ways that strategically support our ongoing re-focus/re-balance efforts, the OSTI Strategic Plan, and our core mission responsibilities to collect, preserve, and disseminate STI.

Under the re-organization, with our operations in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, I lead OSTI and the Office of the Director, including senior staff responsible for administration, communications, and D.C. liaison. Reporting to me are three OSTI offices focused respectively on collecting, preserving, and disseminating STI.

The OSTI Office of Acquisition and Information Programs, led by Assistant Director and Chief Program Officer Judy C. Gilmore, is responsible for collecting DOE unclassified STI and also DOE classified, controlled, and sensitive R&D results. This office spearheads the DOE Scientific and Technical Information Program, a collaboration of STI liaisons from DOE program, field, site, and procurement offices, national laboratories, and research facilities who work to ensure that the results of DOE-funded R&D are identified and collected. This office also manages STI policy development, program office coordination, the corporate E-Link STI submission system, dataset registration, acquisition and receipt metrics, and OSTI’s work providing secure information services to DOE and the National Nuclear Security Administration.

The OSTI Office of Preservation and Technology, led by Assistant Director and Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey S. Given, is responsible for the long-term preservation of DOE R&D results and OSTI’s IT infrastructure. This office is accountable for records management, academic research partnerships, usage and performance metrics, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) administration. This office also manages IT, cyber, and network operations, safeguards and security, sensitivity reviews, and disaster recovery and continuity of operations.

The OSTI Office of Access and Operations, led by Associate Director and Chief Integration Officer Mark A. Martin, is responsible for managing and disseminating the entire OSTI Catalogue of Collections, including OSTI’s DOE STI products and the science information resources it hosts in partnership with U.S. federal science agencies and global science counterparts. This office is accountable for all facets of making DOE unclassified R&D results accessible, including OSTI strategic and operational planning, public access initiatives, cross-cutting operational integration, product policy, STI systems support, metadata quality and curation, applications software maintenance, and software development.

Of course, an organization’s structure isn’t a recipe for success. It’s the organization’s philosophy of customer service, its sense of purpose, its embrace of change and innovation, the commitment of each and every employee – and ultimately a lot of hard work – that have made OSTI successful. The placement of the “boxes” simply needs to make clear who owns strategic goals, to reflect our core priorities and functions, and then to remove any barriers to innovation and excellence. Our structure will continue to evolve when needed. In the meantime, I’m pleased to announce this structure and the top-notch leadership and teams we have in our three new line organizations.

Brian A. Hitson was named Director of the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information in September 2014.

Retiree Tribute: J. Lowell Langford

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J. Lowell Langford

J. Lowell Langford is among the many OSTI retirees who made a significant impact on our organization during their years of service and helped get OSTI to where it is today. Lowell began his career in 1957 at Y-12, where he worked as a postal carrier. He went on to work in printing at K25 and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He eventually worked his way up to Site Records Manager at ORNL and served in that position until his initial retirement in 1991. Lowell then came to work as OSTI’s Records and Files Manager, and after ten years, retired again and began work as a consultant with OSTI’s support services contractors. He said his final goodbye to the professional world, after 51 years, in 2008.

Along the way, Lowell became one of the most highly regarded members of the DOE records management community. He also is respected by information professionals nationwide. Lowell maintained leadership roles at the local and international levels of the Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA) International. He was also inducted into the ARMA Fellows program, and an ARMA award for distinguished service was named in his honor.

Today, Lowell and his wife Joan maintain an active lifestyle. They share the bounty of their vegetable garden with neighbors (as they used to with his OSTI colleagues). They enjoy line dancing, exercising, and a lot of yard work. Mostly, they are keeping up with their first grandchild, two-and-a-half year-old Thomas James Langford.

This retiree tribute is intended to help our OSTI community keep up with former colleagues and friends. Look for additional tributes to OSTI retirees in upcoming issues.