Progress in Advancing Public Access to DOE R&D Results Recognized with the Secretary of Energy Achievement Award
At the Department of Energy (DOE) Honor Awards ceremony on September 15, 2016, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz recognized the progress made by DOE and partnering agencies in advancing public access to the results of federally funded scientific research. He presented the Secretary of Energy Achievement Award to the Public Access to DOE Research and Development (R&D) Results Team for contributions that "resulted in a framework for unprecedented access to scholarly publications and digital data emanating from DOE's $11 billion annual R&D investments." The Secretary of Energy Achievement Award is for groups or teams of DOE employees or contractors who together accomplished significant achievements on behalf of the Department.
In February 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum that called on federal science agencies to implement plans for increasing public access to peer-reviewed accepted manuscripts or journal articles and scientific data resulting from agency research investments.
With input and support from across DOE, the Office of Science and its Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) developed the DOE Public Access Plan, which was issued in July 2014 after becoming the first such federal science agency blueprint to be approved by OSTP.
OSTI then launched the DOE Public Access Gateway for Energy and ScienceBeta (DOE PAGESBeta), the web-based portal that makes scholarly scientific publications resulting from DOE research funding publicly accessible and searchable at no charge to users. Two years after its launch, the portal contained 25,500 accepted manuscripts and journal articles. A key factor behind DOE's early success in public access has been the support of all DOE program and site offices along with all 17 national labs and their representatives in the DOE Scientific and Technical Information Program. The content of DOE PAGESBeta will continue to expand and become an increasingly important component of the nearly 3 million DOE R&D publications, datasets, patents, software packages, and videos that OSTI already makes publicly available as its mission.
OSTI also partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF Public Access Repository) and the Department of Defense (DoD Public Access Search) in their efforts to implement solutions modeled after DOE's approach and engaged in a public-private collaboration with the publishing industry to complement DOE's public access efforts.
To increase access to digital research data, the Office of Science laid the groundwork and then collaborated across DOE to develop the DOE Policy for Digital Research Data Management, which requires that research activities sponsored by the Department have an associated data management plan (DMP) describing whether and how the digital data generated by DOE-sponsored research will be shared and preserved. Under the policy, each DOE sponsoring research office must include the requirements for DMPs in all solicitations and invitations for research funding, with details about how and when a DMP should be submitted.
The Office of Science and OSTI appreciate the Secretary's recognition as well as the work of their employees and both internal and external stakeholders and partners in enabling DOE's rapid progress in increasing public access to its scholarly publications and digital data.
OSTI Presents at International Data Week
As part of OSTI's mission to collect, preserve, and disseminate scientific and technical information (STI) resulting from research and development performed by DOE, including a rapidly increasing amount of data, OSTI recognizes the importance of being active in the data community. To meet the needs of researchers as new processes of digital acquisition have created a surge of data and created new challenges in data management and discoverability, OSTI hosts a database and offers a service to help make DOE scientific research data available for discovery and reuse. The DOE Data Explorer (DDE) is a search tool that enables users to locate DOE's collections of scientific research data and also retrieve individual datasets submitted by data centers, repositories, and other organizations within the Department. Through the DOE Data ID Service, OSTI assigns persistent identifiers, known as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), to datasets submitted by DOE and its contractor and grantee researchers and registers the DOIs with DataCite to help increase access to digital data from DOE-funded scientific research.
OSTI recently attended a number of events at International Data Week (IDW), a conference held September 11-17, 2016, in Denver, CO. IDW brought together data professionals and researchers from all disciplines and from around the world to explore how best to exploit the data revolution to improve the scientific community's knowledge and benefit society through data-driven research and innovation. IDW was an ideal venue for OSTI to learn how others are thinking about data and to discuss plans to enhance the way researchers and data-minded individuals discover data produced by DOE.
OSTI representatives also made presentations during IDW. In addition to making accessible collections of DOE STI (including DDE), OSTI serves as the operating agent for Science.gov, which provides access to science information (including data) from 15 Federal science agencies, and for WorldWideScience.org, which searches more than 100 scientific and technical databases from more than 70 nations around the world (including the content of Science.gov). On September 11, OSTI Director Brian Hitson spoke to the Members' Forum of the International Council for Science (ICSU) World Data System about the STI and research data available on WorldWideScience.org. The ICSU World Data System is an Associate Member of the WorldWideScience Alliance, which governs the international science gateway; WorldWideScience.org searches 15 resources focused on data (including the ICSU World Data System's collection) and is actively seeking new data resources. The inclusion of data collections in WorldWideScience.org, Hitson noted, further expands access to research and development results during the full research lifecycle and ultimately contributes to increased scientific collaboration and progress.
An integral part of International Data Week was a major conference focused on data science and data management. SciDataCon 2016, held September 11-13, was attended by over 600 scientists, researchers, industry leaders, policy makers, and data stewards. On September 12, OSTI's DDE Product Manager Sara Studwell presented at SciDataCon, during a session focused on data enrichment and packaging, about an exciting new project that re-envisions DDE and allows researchers to better understand the data at the point of search. Through a multi-phase restructuring, OSTI will create meaningful contextual relationships between data objects to make the data more accessible. Phase 1 is currently under way and is focused on improving the organization of the DDE database to ensure that these relationships are exposed to users; Phase 1 functionality will be available to users early in 2017. Long-term goals include working closely with researchers to explore how OSTI can present data in more meaningful and contextually relevant ways.
Attending IDW provided OSTI with a wealth of information about the current data landscape and insights into future developments that will help to guide decisions about OSTI's data discovery tools and services as the frontiers of data science expand. Please continue to monitor DDE over the coming months to see the improvements. And if you are interested in making your DOE-funded research data more discoverable by registering it for a DOI or want to learn more about the DOE Data Explorer or the DOE Data ID Service, please contact us at ddecomments@osti.gov.
ORCID iDs Help Link Authors and Their Research Results on SciTech Connect
Name ambiguity is an age-old problem for authors, especially for researchers, when so much importance is placed on author contribution and the scholarly output of research funding. ORCID, a nonprofit organization working to connect and identify research and researchers, aims to resolve the issue of authorship confusion and help authors retain credit for their works through the use of persistent digital identifiers, or ORCID iDs. Through ORCID, authors can register and be assigned a unique iD, presented in the form of a web address, linked to an author's profile, which will remain valid and stable, regardless of the author's changes in discipline, research project, organization, or position. To date, nearly 2.5 million ORCID iDs have been assigned, and this number is growing daily.
ORCID first opened its registry allowing researchers to register ORCID iDs and link their works to their iDs in 2012, and OSTI was one of the first federal organizations to embrace the ORCID concept. In 2013, OSTI began offering researchers the option to include an ORCID iD with each submission to E-Link, DOE's corporate STI ingest system, and added a field to the search interface for SciTech Connect, the primary repository for DOE scientific and technical information, so that users could find works associated with a particular iD. Now, in 2016, OSTI offers authors the option to add records to the Works section of their ORCID profiles via SciTech Connect, following a brief authorization protocol.
At SciTech Connect, authors can navigate to the authorization portal by selecting "Connect your ORCID iD" and following the prompts. After logging in, authors may search and interact with SciTech to identify records they have authored or co-authored and then select those to be added to their Works. When the screen is refreshed, the record will appear immediately in their ORCID Works list. Authors may also give a blanket approval, following the same path, so that any time OSTI receives records containing the authors' iDs, they will be automatically added to their ORCID Works. These two methods are convenient means for researchers to update and maintain their professional portfolios.
DOE Open Government Plan 4.0 Highlights OSTI Products
On his first day in office in January 2009, President Obama signed a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government that called on agencies to provide "an unprecedented level of openness in government" and instructed the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to prepare a directive to "establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration" throughout the federal government. The Administration's open government directive subsequently issued by OMB required each executive department and agency to prepare and issue an open government plan in 2010 and every two years thereafter.
OSTI has collected, preserved, and disseminated scientific and technical information emanating from R&D performed by DOE and its predecessor agencies for nearly 70 years. OSTI grew out of the post-World War II initiative to make the declassified research of the Manhattan Project as freely available to the public as possible; OSTI has helped pioneer open government ever since it was established in 1947.
The first three DOE Open Government Plans, published in 2010, 2012, and 2014, recognized a number of OSTI's contributions to advancing the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration by making STI accessible. In September 2016, the Department of Energy published the DOE Open Government Plan 4.0, and it too features a number of OSTI's products and services.
Under "New and Expanded Initiatives," this latest DOE plan has a section on "Access to Data and Scientific Publications" that includes write-ups about three OSTI products:
- "DOE Provides Access to Scientific Publications via DOE PAGESBeta;"
- "SciTech Connect, Primary Repository for DOE Science, Technology, and Engineering Research Information, Continues to Grow;" and
- "WorldWideScience.org Will Search U.S. and Other Governments' Public Access Portals."
In addition, under "Ongoing Initiatives," the DOE Open Government Plan 4.0 includes:
- an entry about "Collaboration" headlined "New DOE Data ID Service Microsite Helps Increase Access to Scientific Research Data" and
- an item on "Declassification" that notes the completion of two major declassification projects and the release of their associated documents on DOE OpenNet, a website supported by the DOE Office of Classification and hosted by OSTI.
At OSTI, we work to extend the reach and impact of DOE research results—and bring the world's research to DOE. Our mission is to advance scientific and technical creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to DOE researchers and the public. We are proud of OSTI's open government legacy and pleased that some of our contributions to transparency, participation, and collaboration were recognized in the latest DOE Open Government Plan.
Statistically Speaking: DOepatents
DOepatents, developed and hosted by OSTI, is a searchable database of more than 36,500 patents resulting from DOE R&D and includes patents that DOE sponsored through a variety of funding mechanisms, including grants, contracts, or cooperative agreements. OSTI is working to collect and account for all DOE R&D results in our collections, and we have achieved this goal for the first time in DOepatents.
Through a partnership with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and regular updates to the database, DOepatents provides access to the full complement of patents funded by DOE and consists of bibliographic records, with full text where available, either via a PDF file or an HTML link to the record at the USPTO. The number of DOE-funded patents issued annually has nearly doubled, from 600+ in calendar year 2007 to 1200+ in 2015 and more than 900 so far in 2016. This comprehensive coverage of DOE patents is one way to demonstrate the Department's significant contribution to scientific progress in the physical sciences and other disciplines.
Meet Catherine Pepmiller
Catherine Pepmiller
Catherine Pepmiller started work at OSTI in 2014 as a summer intern and then joined contractor Information International Associates and its OSTI information science team before being hired as an OSTI Librarian in February 2015. She is a member of the product management team in OSTI's Office of Access and Operations and serves as product manager of SciTech Connect, OSTI's flagship product for dissemination of all types of DOE-funded research, and ScienceCinema, a multimedia presentation tool. Catherine is also stepping into a role in higher education outreach as DOE MARC Records coordinator and OSTI's liaison to the American Library Association.
Catherine has a Bachelor of Arts in History and Anthropology from Missouri State University in Springfield, MO, and a Master's in Library and Information Sciences from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Along with her two dogs, she currently calls Knoxville home.
Retiree Tribute: Carol Patterson
Carol Patterson
Carol Patterson began her federal career in 1956 at the Technical Information Center, as OSTI was then called. Her first job was in the card cataloguing operation, used for receipt and retrieval of research and development reports. As technology evolved and new programs were developed, Carol's responsibilities changed. She was transferred to the motion picture film library and loan service, where she loaned copies of educational and energy research films to academia, industry, professional societies, and the general public. After the film library ceased operations, Carol worked until her 1994 retirement in the Control Section of the Document Control and Evaluation Branch, where she initiated the report processing cycle and assigned subject categories to incoming DOE research and development reports.
In retirement, Carol has dedicated much of her time helping others by working in her church's food pantry. She and her husband Burl have enjoyed many motorhome trips to join their friends at NASCAR races across the country. Carol has continued to make her beautiful, award-winning quilts over the years. While the Pattersons have been busy with many activities during their retirement, Carol says their son and daughter and their families remain their greatest pleasure.
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.
In the OSTI Collections: Quantum Dots
The total electron charge density (shown in green) of a quantum dot of gallium arsenide, containing just 465 atoms. (Image Credit: Lin-Wang Wang, LBNL)
Quantum dots are incredibly small specs of semiconductor materials with large potential for everyday applications in biomedical diagnostics, display technologies, photovoltaic cells, and light-emitting diode (LED) materials. Dr. Paul Alivisatos, a nanochemist at (and former Director of) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and his collaborators pioneered the synthesis of semiconductor quantum dots, opening up new possibilities for how quantum dots can be used to transform and improve materials' properties.
DOE databases provide a myriad of free DOE research project reports and publications about quantum dots and their applications. Read more about quantum dots in William Watson's white paper, In the OSTI Collections: Quantum Dots.
Check out In the OSTI Collections to see other featured topics, including Geothermal Energy, Interferometry, Solitons, and The Space Environment and Space Technology.
The Latest from OSTIblog
OSTIblog features the technology, services, people, and policies that are crucial to OSTI's role in increasing accessibility of DOE-sponsored research. Here are some of the most recent OSTIblogs:
- The Grand Compromise of U.S. Public Access Programs: Going Green
- OSTI and ORCID: Working to Help Link DOE Authors and Their Research Results
- Brady Hot Springs - A Geothermal Success Story
- Incredible Laser Interferometers
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