OSTI.gov Newsletter

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The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has been making research and development (R&D) findings available to researchers and the public since 1947. Over the years, OSTI has been innovative in adapting to changing circumstances to fulfill its core mission of collecting, preserving and disseminating all forms of scientific and technical information (STI) from DOE.  Since the earliest days of the Information Age, OSTI has been a leader in making the web work for science, creating collections of digitized STI, establishing an energy science and technology virtual library and developing and adopting cutting-edge web tools such as federated search and relevancy ranking of results.

Now OSTI is focused on meeting a new challenge that is also a momentous opportunity: providing public access to the gold standard of DOE scientific communications, peer-reviewed journal articles and accepted manuscripts resulting from DOE research investments.

DOE Public Access Plan and Gateway

In February 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum, “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,” that calls on federal science agencies such as DOE to develop and implement public access plans for making accepted manuscripts and peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and scientific data in digital formats resulting from agency research investments publicly available in timely fashion.

OSTI helped draft the DOE plan for providing public access to scientific publications and scientific data in digital formats that was submitted to OSTP last fall. OSTI also has developed a DOE public access portal that will make scholarly scientific publications resulting from DOE research funding publicly accessible and searchable at no charge to readers.

OSTP has reviewed and provided feedback on DOE’s draft public access plan, and DOE will respond to that feedback before implementing its public access solution. 

As it prepares to lead implementation of public access to scholarly publications for DOE, OSTI is focusing more than ever on its core mission and re-allocating resources to meet the public access challenge.

DOE Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP)

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OSTI leads the DOE Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP), a collaboration of STI managers and technical information officers from across the DOE complex responsible for identifying, collecting, preserving and making accessible the results of DOE-funded R&D. The DOE STIP network includes STI liaisons from DOE programs, field, site and procurement offices, national laboratories and research facilities. Thanks to their contributions, OSTI has made significant progress in identifying and collecting DOE STI. As reported in the last issue of the OSTI.gov Newsletter, STIP submissions were more than 50 percent higher at the end of fiscal year 2013 than FY12, totaling more than 31,000 items; OSTI and STIP are on pace for similar results in FY14.

Together, OSTI and STIP have a well-developed program in place to identify and provide access to DOE STI, including technical reports, patents and journal articles, through a sophisticated submission system and a number of search tools. OSTI will use the STIP network and infrastructure as the central element of its public access solution. They also are collaborating to make headway in such emerging forms of STI as multimedia and metadata for datasets. As Dr. Jeffrey Salmon, Deputy Director for Resource Management in the DOE Office of Science, wrote in a recent OSTIblog, OSTI is focused “first and foremost [on] the STI produced by DOE and serving DOE R&D interests” and “working to be as comprehensive as possible in its processes to collect, preserve/curate and disseminate all forms of STI from DOE.”

Re-Allocating Resources and Refreshing the OSTI Homepage

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To cite Dr. Salmon’s blog again, “to be successful with the public access opportunity and better focus on the DOE mission,” OSTI is re-allocating resources. Earlier this year, OSTI streamlined its product portfolio by discontinuing a number of products/services, including Adopt-A-Doc, EDUconnections, DOE Green Energy, Science Conference Proceedings, Science Lab and Science Open Access Journals.  By this June, OSTI also plans to eliminate ScienceAccelerator, consolidating most of its contents into SciTech Connect, the DOE STI flagship product.  At that time, ScienceAccelerator resources are also scheduled to be available through the National Library of Energy^Beta, which offers federated searching of information across DOE.

As Dr. Salmon explained in his blog, “All of these products have filled important niches for diverse audiences, and OSTI will continue to serve these communities through existing products, such as SciTech Connect and our pending public access tool. But we have to make room for a greater emphasis on access to scholarly publications.”

Finally, in early March, the OSTI website got a new look. In Dr. Salmon’s words, “This redesign … reflect[s] OSTI’s rebalancing to focus on core DOE R&D results, making way for access to scholarly publications, and … provide[s] for simplified searching across the OSTI collection.”