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

New Tutorials Help Users Make the Most of DOE PAGES^Beta

PAGES250_icon2.png

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has created a series of three online tutorials to help users navigate the DOE Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science^Beta (DOE PAGES^Beta), the DOE portal that makes scholarly publications resulting from DOE research funding publicly accessible and searchable at no charge.

DOE PAGES^Beta offers free access to the best available full-text version of DOE-affiliated scholarly publications – either the peer-reviewed, accepted manuscript or the published article – after an administrative interval of 12 months. Launched in August 2014, DOE PAGES^Beta was developed and is maintained by OSTI, a unit of the DOE Office of Science.

DOE PAGES^Beta represents DOE’s response to the February 22, 2013, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum, “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,” that called on federal science agencies to develop plans to provide public access to the results of research they fund within a year of publication. The Department subsequently prepared and, in July 2014, published the DOE Public Access Plan, which detailed the steps the agency would take to increase public access to scientific publications.

DOE PAGES^Beta leverages the long-established DOE Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP) infrastructure and corporate E-Link submission system for collecting, preserving, and disseminating scientific and technical information (STI) to encompass accepted manuscripts. DOE-funded authors at national laboratories and grantee and other research institutions are using this existing process to submit metadata and links to accepted manuscripts (or the full text itself) to OSTI.

To complement the DOE-supplied content and to enable access to the “best available version,” OSTI is also collaborating with the publisher consortium CHORUS, or the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States. The DOE portal ingests publisher-supplied metadata and links to participating publishers’ DOE-affiliated publicly accessible content. Thus, when a publisher provides a publicly accessible article about DOE research and development (R&D) results, DOE PAGES^Beta links to it; if the article is not available, DOE PAGES^Beta provides access to the corresponding accepted manuscript.

OSTI recently produced three DOE PAGES^Beta tutorials to help maximize the use and visibility of the DOE public access resource, as called for in Goal 4 of the 2015-2019 OSTI Strategic Plan.

Introduction to DOE PAGES^Beta

Three Types of Content on DOE PAGES^Beta

DOE PAGES^Beta Advanced Search

Watched individually or as a set, the tutorials are designed to help users take advantage of the full functionality of DOE PAGES^Beta to access peer-reviewed publications resulting from DOE funding. OSTI invites you to check them out – and if you have questions and comments, please send them to pagesfeedback@osti.gov.The first DOE PAGES^Beta tutorial was designed for new users: it provides an introduction to the public access gateway, its contents, and its search capabilities. The other two tutorials are intended to help returning users better craft their searches. One tutorial provides additional information on the three types of documents available at DOE PAGES^Beta – accepted manuscripts, publisher accepted manuscripts, and published articles; the other tutorial offers tips on how to use the DOE PAGES^Beta advanced search to enhance results.

An OSTI Service for Libraries: SciTech Connect Full-Text MARC Records

scitech_marc.jpg

Since 2008, OSTI has offered librarians and the library community the opportunity to download records of DOE scientific and technical Information in MARC format. By using OSTI’s DOE MARC Records System, libraries can easily expand access straight from their online catalogs to DOE-funded research results available via SciTech Connect, the primary repository of DOE science, technology, and engineering research information, from the Manhattan Project to the present.

MARC, short for MAchine Readable Cataloging, is a standard format for bibliographic records, a universal translation of the information that allows any computer to read and interpret the record. The MARC standard relies on field designations, file structure, and content encoding to present clear descriptions of each record.

SciTech Connect full-text MARC records include all the records from SciTech Connect that contain links to freely available full text, including textual material, multimedia, and datasets. The subject disciplines covered include physics, chemistry, materials, biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer and information science, renewable energy, and other topics of interest related to the DOE mission. Currently, the downloadable files comprise more than 434,000 DOE-sponsored STI records.

Records can be downloaded by subject matter, publication year, sponsoring organization, or individual reports. A zip file of the full collection is also available.

To date, 20 universities and five DOE national laboratories have taken part in the SciTech Connect MARC records program (see box). Libraries that have loaded parts or all of the SciTech Connect full-text collection into their catalogs have experienced significant increases in retrievals of DOE scientific and technical reports by their library users – and rank among the top universities for downloads from OSTI.

During the summer of 2015, Stanford University became the latest library to load the complete set of SciTech Connect MARC Records into its general catalog. This made a more comprehensive collection of scientific research materials freely available to the Stanford community, and analysis of traffic patterns indicates that students and researchers there are taking advantage of the corpus. During the first quarter of FY 2016, Stanford University traffic accounted for the fourth highest number of user sessions logged by SciTech Connect, higher than many DOE national labs and government agencies.

Adding SciTech Connect’s full-text MARC records to a library archive is a valuable way to expand access to scientific information and provide users with further content, thereby aiding research and discovery. While OSTI’s databases of DOE STI are publicly available and searchable and many universities and DOE national labs feature SciTech Connect as a link on their websites, having the records themselves in a library collection allows for organic discovery in the same place that a user would normally search for books and other resources. If you are interested in more information about downloading SciTech Connect full-text MARC records, please view the FAQ or contact MARCrecords@osti.gov.

Statistically Speaking: The OSTI Catalogue of Collections

osti_collections.png

OSTI provides access to scientific and technical information related to DOE missions, both through OSTI search tools and through other commonly used search engines, offering ever-expanding sources of R&D information to DOE, the research community, and the science-attentive public. The OSTI Catalogue of Collections includes DOE science resources, as well as U.S. federal and global science information:

SciTech Connect, the DOE collection of free, publicly available R&D results including technical reports, bibliographic citations, journal articles, conference papers, books, multimedia, software, and data information, now has over 2.75 million records. More than 410,000 of those are electronic full text.
DOE PAGES^Beta, the portal to scholarly publications resulting from DOE research funding, contains over 18,000 journal articles and accepted manuscripts.
The DOE Data Explorer database includes over 17,800 citations for dataset collections and individual datasets.
ScienceCinema has over 3,800 science and technology-related videos highlighting leading-edge research from the DOE as well as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
DOepatents has over 35,000 patents resulting from DOE-sponsored research and development.
DOE R&D Accomplishments has 524 specially selected documents dealing with accomplishments that have had significant economic impact, have improved people’s lives, or have been widely recognized as remarkable advances in science. There are also 121 feature pages about top scientists and important areas of research, 97 of which provide information about Nobel-winning researchers associated with DOE or DOE predecessors.
The National Library of Energy^Beta searches 17 science-driven databases, a total of 25 million pages, including several decentralized information collections from across the DOE complex.
Science.gov searches over 60 databases and over 2,200 selected websites from 15 federal science agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information.
WorldWideScience.org, a global science gateway comprised of national and international scientific databases and portals, lets you search 100 collections from over 70 countries in 10 different languages.

OSTI Products Now Available on Range of Devices

scitech_devices.jpg

Have you ever tried to view a website with your smart phone and discovered that the text was illegible, the graphics overlapped, and that navigation was nearly impossible? Responsive design is the solution to these issues. To meet the increasing needs of multi-device users, OSTI recently enhanced our search portals to be “responsive,” enabling users to view content across a range of devices, from desktop computer monitors to tablets and smart phones.

Unlike mobile sites—separate websites which may contain less information than the full site and reduced user features and which must be updated and maintained alongside the primary site—responsive websites are built to adjust when viewed on particular devices, while providing access to the same information, content, and functionality. OSTI’s core catalog of search portals can now automatically adjust to fit specific screens, regardless of size, displaying information in an optimal format, with user-friendly navigation. Information is available on the go, providing mobile device users with a consistently efficient and visually pleasing experience.

Check out the optimized responsive browsing on all these OSTI products: SciTech Connect, DOE Pages^Beta, DOE Data Explorer (DDE), ScienceCinema, DOepatents, DOE R&D Accomplishments, National Library of Energy^Beta, Science.gov, and WorldWideScience.org.

Search Tip: How to Find the Right Author

author_select_border.png

SciTech Connect offers an Author Select (or author thesaurus) tool to help you search on all variations of an author name. Using the Advanced Search option, select the icon to the right of the Creator/Author field, then type in a name, or the first few letters of a name, in one or both of the appropriate search boxes and select the search button. A minimum of two characters is required in the Last Name field, but the First Name field can be left blank.

Entering ‘Andrews’ in Last Name and ‘V’ in First Name will retrieve a list of all choices for V Andrews. You have the ability to include any or all of these in your search by using the ‘Add’ button to the right of each name variant. After your selections have been added, you can enter information into any other Advanced Search field and then select ‘Find’ to get your results.

This Author Select feature is also available in DOE PAGES^Beta, DOE Data Explorer, ScienceCinema, and DOepatents.

Meet Senior Science Advisor and Product Strategist Carly Robinson

carly_robinson.jpg

Carly Robinson
Senior Science Advisor
and Product Strategist

Carly Robinson joined OSTI in 2015 as Senior Science Advisor and Product Strategist in the Washington, DC office. She is coordinating a series of workshops at DOE national laboratories to explore how lab-based scientists use scientific and technical information in the research workflow. Carly serves on several Departmental, interagency, and national working groups to keep current on public access policies and directives associated with OSTI’s efforts to develop and implement public access tools. She also engages with government and non-governmental organizations to track software and applications development standards and guidelines related to receipt, processing, and dissemination of STI for inclusion in OSTI tools.

Before joining OSTI, Carly was an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Policy Fellow in Congress and in the Executive Branch. During her fellowships, she worked for former U.S. Senator Mark Udall on energy and environment issues and then in the DOE Office of Science on data management policies and making DOE-funded research data more accessible. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Physics and Mathematics from Michigan Technological University and a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Chemistry from the University of Colorado.

Retiree Tribute: Mo Whitson

mo_whitson.jpg

Mo Whitson

Mo Whitson was a key player in OSTI’s scientific and technical information management program during his 29-year tenure. Initially, he worked as a physicist in the abstracting and indexing group, specializing in the emerging field of fusion energy, where he compiled and published the “Glossary of Fusion Energy Terminology.” Later he worked in the DOE STI Program with laboratory representatives, where he did onsite program reviews and developed DOE Orders for the management of STI. Mo concluded his career at OSTI as director of the energy data information systems group, ensuring the technical integrity of OSTI’s databases.

More than 20 years have passed since Mo walked the halls at OSTI, and he hasn’t spent this time just sitting in his handcrafted rocking chair. Mo and his wife Gwen enjoy the families of their five daughters and seven grandchildren. They also spend much of their time in a computerized woodworking shop creating exotic works of art.

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.