The Department of Energy recently issued its latest Open Government Plan, and the document recognizes the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) for advancing open government and the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration by making scientific and technical information (STI) publicly available.

On his first day in office in January 2009, President Obama signed the Memorandum of Transparency and Open Government, which 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 departments and agency to prepare and issue an open government plan in 2010 and every two years thereafter.

OSTI grew out of the post-World War II initiative to make the declassified scientific research of the Manhattan Project as freely available to the public as possible, and throughout its 67-year history, OSTI has built very large collections of energy-related STI, emanating primarily from the work of DOE and its predecessor agencies. Today OSTI makes these STI collections available through sophisticated web products, and its R&D results are accessed more than 400 million times annually.

The DOE Open Government Plan 3.0, published June 1, 2014, included four OSTI products. Featured as new collaboration initiatives were SciTech Connect, OSTI’s primary repository for DOE science, technology and engineering research information, and the National Library of Energy^Beta, a gateway to information (including STI) across the DOE complex.

The latest DOE Open Government Plan also provided updates on two OSTI products mentioned in previous DOE plans: Science Cinema, a collection of multimedia videos highlighting DOE’s scientific research, and WorldWideScience.org, an OSTI-hosted portal offering science resources from more than 70 nations around the world.

“With our tradition of science and research,” Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz wrote in the introduction to the DOE Open Government Plan 3.0, “the Department of Energy has long seen the benefits of providing access to information and encouraging collaboration. Over the past few years, we’ve made great strides in harnessing new technologies and tools to advance these goals.” 

OSTI is committed to helping DOE continue to fulfill the vision of the President’s open government initiative. For more information about OSTI's portfolio of products, please consult the OSTI Catalog of Collections.