OSTI Launches DOE PAGESBeta
Portal Offers Public Access to Scholarly Scientific Publications Resulting from DOE Research Funding
The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has collected, preserved, and disseminated scientific and technical information (STI) emanating from research and development (R&D) performed by DOE and its predecessor agencies for nearly 70 years. DOE today conducts more than $10 billion a year in R&D, and OSTI helps ensure a return on those investments by making DOE-sponsored R&D results available in web-based searchable databases.
To date, these databases have included electronic full-text research reports; energy citations going back to the Manhattan Project era; e-prints (journal article pre-publication drafts, scholarly papers, and more); DOE patents; energy science and technology software; multimedia videos about DOE and other science research; DOE non-text data collections; and DOE R&D accomplishments. Now, OSTI has begun collecting, archiving, and making publicly accessible at no charge to users the scholarly journal publications resulting from DOE research funding – through a new public access portal and search engine.
On August 4, 2014, DOE launched the Department of Energy Public Access Gateway for Energy and ScienceBeta (DOE PAGESBeta), which, when fully operational, will offer free public access to the best available full-text version of DOE-affiliated scholarly publications – either the peer-reviewed, accepted manuscript or the published scientific journal article – after an administrative interval of 12 months. When a publisher provides a publicly-accessible article about DOE R&D results, DOE PAGESBeta will link to that article; if the article is not available, DOE PAGESBeta will provide access to the corresponding accepted manuscript obtained through the DOE Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP).
DOE PAGESBeta represents DOE’s response to the February 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memorandum, “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,” which called on federal agencies that spend more than $100 million a year on R&D to develop and implement plans to make accepted manuscripts and peer-reviewed journal articles resulting from agency research investments publicly available in a timely fashion. The DOE public access tool was developed and is maintained by OSTI, a unit of the DOE Office of Science.
DOE PAGESBeta Relies on Collaboration
DOE PAGESBeta is a cooperative and cost-effective approach to public access to scientific journal publications stemming from DOE research and development. The portal and search engine employs a hybrid model of centralized metadata and primarily decentralized full-text access to accepted manuscripts hosted by DOE-funded national laboratories and universities and to articles hosted by individual publishers. In this way, DOE PAGESBeta builds on DOE’s existing STI management infrastructure and also integrates publishers’ public access efforts.
DOE PAGESBeta leverages the long-established DOE STIP infrastructure and corporate E-Link submission system for collecting, preserving, and disseminating STI to encompass accepted manuscripts. DOE-funded authors at national laboratories and grantee and other research institutions will use this existing infrastructure to submit metadata and links to accepted manuscripts (or the full text itself) to OSTI.
To complement the DOE-supplied content and in support of “best available version,” OSTI also is collaborating with the publisher consortium CHORUS, or the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States. DOE PAGESBeta will ingest publisher-supplied metadata and link to participating publishers’ DOE-affiliated articles.
OSTI also is engaging with other stakeholders’ initiatives to advance public access, such as the university and research library community’s SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE).
Regardless of where DOE-affiliated articles or accepted manuscripts are hosted, DOE PAGESBeta will enable readers to search them all via a single query. The metadata and full text of the articles and manuscripts have been indexed for search optimization. In most cases, free public access to full text will occur after a 12-month administrative interval. There will be no requirement for a username, password, or other form of registration.
By statute, OSTI is responsible for maintaining publicly available collections of STI resulting from research, development, demonstration, and commercial applications activities supported by DOE, and the OSTI mission is to advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to DOE researchers and the public. OSTI is proud to add DOE PAGESBeta to its portfolio of DOE STI resources and to make scholarly scientific publications arising from DOE funding more readily accessible to the public.
Why Is DOE PAGESBeta Called “Beta”?
When launched in August 2014, DOE PAGESBeta offered a preliminary collection of accepted manuscripts and journal articles to allow stakeholders internal and external to DOE to begin using PAGES before the initial twelve-month administrative period concludes. This “beta” version of DOE PAGES contains a selection of journal articles and accepted manuscripts intended to demonstrate DOE PAGES’ functionality and eventual expanded content. This initial collection is a combination of journal article records previously submitted to OSTI and records made available by the publisher consortium, CHORUS.
Over the next year, metadata and links to articles and accepted manuscripts will be added as they are submitted to OSTI, with anticipated annual growth of 20,000-30,000 publicly-accessible articles and manuscripts. Following broader implementation of processes for ongoing content growth and submission, the beta version of DOE PAGES will transition to a full release.
Meanwhile, public consultation is a key part of OSTI’s implementation of DOE PAGES. Throughout the beta period and beyond, feedback about DOE PAGESBeta is welcomed and may be provided to pagesfeedback@osti.gov.
Brian Hitson Named Director of OSTI
Brian A. Hitson, Director of OSTI
Brian A. Hitson has been named Director of the Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information. In a September 22, 2014, email, Dr. Jeffrey Salmon, Deputy Director of the Office of Science for Resource Management, wrote:
I am pleased to announce that Brian Hitson has been appointed the Director of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information. OSTI’s mission is to advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to the Department of Energy researchers and the public. OSTI is a DOE corporate function that is managed by the Office of Science. OSTI most recently led the development of the Department’s plan to provide public access to scholarly publications and maintains a massive collection of DOE R&D results going back to the Manhattan Project.
Brian has held a number of positions at OSTI, most recently serving as Associate Director for Administration and Information Services, with responsibilities for international information exchanges, archival digitization and preservation, classified and sensitive information, cost-reimbursable product development, and administrative and financial management. Brian has chaired or served as a representative on numerous national and international information management groups, including the WorldWideScience Alliance and International Council for Scientific and Technical Information, and agreements under both the International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Energy Agency. Brian has led the implementation of the DOE public access plan for scholarly publications, the first such plan to have been approved by the White House, and he personally forged cooperative working relationships on public access with federal research agencies, the publishing community, and other key stakeholders.
Hitson had been serving as Acting Director of OSTI since January 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.
Hitson has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and a Master's in Business Administration, both from the University of Tennessee. He is a 2011 graduate of the Federal Executive Institute's Leadership for a Democratic Society Program.
Brian’s OSTI colleagues all join in congratulating him on his appointment and wishing him continued success as Director of DOE OSTI.
OSTI 2015-2019 Strategic Plan Issued
The 2015-2019 OSTI Strategic Plan, issued on September 30, 2014, highlights OSTI’s renewed focus on providing comprehensive access to the results of DOE research and development investments. We have streamlined the portfolio of our public-facing web products to make it easier to find DOE’s R&D results, and we are working to ensure our collections and portals reflect the complete R&D output of DOE.
The OSTI Strategic Plan organizes our goals around the sequential and process-oriented nature of OSTI’s business, including the collection, preservation, and dissemination of scientific and technical information emanating from DOE R&D efforts. A key element of the Plan is implementation of public access to the peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from DOE R&D funding.
This Plan is intended to give OSTI strategic focus and discipline, but it is fluid and dynamic and will be adapted and updated as unforeseen conditions and opportunities arise. Above all, OSTI is committed to serving DOE and the American public, and we will listen, respond, and act in their interest.
We sincerely invite your review of the 2015-2019 OSTI Strategic Plan – and we welcome your feedback about our goals and strategic
objectives: OSTIWebmaster@osti.gov.
WorldWideScience.org Features New Design and Improved Multilingual Translations
WorldWideScience.org has recently been enhanced with a fresh new design. In addition to the new graphics and logo, the software upgrade implements improvements to the multilingual translations feature, making use of Microsoft Research’s latest machine translation technology, via Microsoft® Translator. WorldWideScience.org offers users the ability to search and translate between any of ten different languages – Arabic, Chinese, German, English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Russian. Users may conduct real-time, simultaneous searches of approximately 100 scientific databases from more than 70 countries worldwide. A new clustering option also provides the ability to quickly identify results from a specific country.
WorldWideScience.org is developed and maintained by OSTI, on behalf of the WorldWideScience Alliance. Through this initiative, OSTI supports scientific collaboration and information exchange between DOE researchers and international colleagues.
SciTech Connect Full-Text MARC Records Refresh
The SciTech Connect Full-Text MARC Records webpages for downloading free records of DOE-sponsored research reports available in full text via SciTech Connect have been refreshed and merged into a single page. Replacing the separate pages for downloading records by subject category, publication year, DOE national laboratory, or individual record ID number, the updated page provides the same download capabilities, as well as combining the different filters. For example, users can now get records from a DOE lab by subject category. Additional info on the SciTech Connect Full-Text MARC Records can be found at http://www.osti.gov/home/marcrecords.html.
Research libraries that have loaded the SciTech Connect Full-Text MARC Records into their online catalogs have experienced tremendous increases in the use of DOE sponsored research, even libraries that had not previously shown significant use of SciTech Connect.
Search Tip: Proximity Searching in SciTech Connect and DOE PAGESBeta
SciTech Connect and DOE PAGESBeta have greatly increased the precision of full-text searches with the addition of proximity searching. By using a “near” operator, the distance between search terms can be specified. The syntax uses double quotes, plus ~#, where # indicates the maximum number of words allowable between the search terms.
For example, in DOE PAGESBeta, a full-text search for muon AND scattering yields 411 results. The words muon and scattering could appear close in proximity to each other or on pages far apart in the document – thereby reducing the likelihood that the two concepts may be related. Switching to using the “near” syntax for the full-text search, “muon scattering”~10 , yields 49 results. The terms muon and scattering must appear within 10 words of each other, increasing the chances that the two terms are related. Simply searching for the phrase “muon scattering” only finds 9 results, since in this case the exact phrase must be found. The first search probably returns hundreds of citations in which muon and scattering have little relationship. The proximity search gives a smaller result with a much higher degree of relevancy.
Similarly, a SciTech Connect full-text search for “microwave clouds”~3 specifies that the terms microwave and clouds must occur within three words of each other. Open any citation in this search result and then select the In-Document Search tab. Search microwave clouds and note how closely the two terms appear together. Some occurrences may not be within three words, but at least one occurrence will be.
OpenNet Now Includes Manhattan District History and Oppenheimer Personnel Hearing Transcript
The Department of Energy recently completed two significant declassification efforts and has made the newly released documents publicly available on the OpenNet database, which DOE launched 20 years ago to improve public access to declassified documents. The website is supported by the DOE Office of Classification and hosted by OSTI on a cost-reimbursable basis.
Over a 12-month period concluding in July 2014, DOE released to the public the Manhattan District History, a multi-volume classified history of the Manhattan Project. Commissioned in late 1944 by General Leslie Groves, the history was “intended to describe, in simple terms, easily understood by the average reader, just what the Manhattan District did, and how, when, and where.” The history records the Manhattan Project’s activities and achievements in research, design, construction, operation, and administration, assembling a vast amount of information in a systematic, readily available form.
Through the combined efforts of the Office of Classification and the Office of History and Heritage Resources, in collaboration with OSTI, the full text of the entire 36-volume Manhattan District History, organized in 79 files and containing more than 13,500 pages, is now available to the public on OpenNet. Unclassified and declassified volumes have been scanned and posted. Classified volumes were declassified in full or with redactions; still classified terms, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs were removed and the remaining parts made available to the public.
In October 2014, DOE released the full transcript of hearings held by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in the spring of 1954 on Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who built and directed the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Manhattan Project effort to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. The hearings were held as a result of concerns that Oppenheimer had connections to communists and might have been an agent of the
Soviet Union.
In December 1953, the AEC suspended Oppenheimer’s security clearance and, after a four-week, closed door hearing in April and May 1954, formally revoked the clearance. The personnel security board found that Oppenheimer was loyal and discreet but nevertheless a security risk. In June 1954, the AEC released a redacted version of the hearing transcript, with security classified information deleted, published by the Government Printing Office under the title, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board. Sixty years later, DOE has reviewed the original transcript and made available to the public, for the first time, the full text of the transcript in its original form. The 19-volume transcript
is arranged in such a way that pages from which information was deleted in the published version are easy to locate with the deleted information readily identifiable.
The Oppenheimer personnel hearings transcript was made available by the Office of Classification and the Office of History and Heritage Resources on the OpenNet site hosted by OSTI. DOE Historian Terry Fehner has published a related Energy.gov blog, “Unlocking the Mysteries of the J. Robert Oppenheimer Transcript.”
DOE Science Showcase: Earth System Models
Boreal Forest in Quebec, Canada
(Image Credit: Wikipedia Commons, peupleloup)
Optimizing emerging high-performance computing and information technologies, the Department of Energy’s Earth System Modeling Program concentrates on advancing coupled climate and earth system models for climate change projections at global-to-regional spatial scales and temporal scales spanning decadal to centennial. This program focuses on research that improves representations in specific model components to achieve credible high-resolution climate simulations that address climate system changes and directly impact societal issues pertaining to future energy use and technology. Read more in Dr. William Watson’s In the OSTI Collections: Earth System Models and the DOE Science Showcase – Earth System Models.
Check out the DOE Science Showcase Archive to see other featured topics, including Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay, Microfluidics, Biofuels, Genomics, 3D Printing, Carbon Sequestration, Effective Field Theories, Aerogels, and High-Performance Computing.
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:
- Accepted Manuscript Submissions for DOE PAGES(Beta) Officially Start October 1, 2014
- Mining for Gold, Neutrinos, and the Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay
- Stretchable Electronics — A New Way to Monitor Health Using Microfluidics
- Achieving Public Access: The Department of Energy Launches DOE PAGES(Beta)
- Scientist Arthur Ragauskas Is Helping Redefine the Bioenergy Research Frontier
- OSTI and Social Media: A Great Way to “Share” DOE STI
OSTI Mission: To advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available
and useful to Department of Energy (DOE) researchers and the public.
