The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), a unit of the Office of Science, recently completed a restructuring to fulfill agency-wide responsibilities to collect, preserve, and disseminate scientific and technical information (STI) emanating from DOE research and development (R&D) activities, including a new obligation to provide public access to DOE-affiliated journal articles.

The re-organization is the culmination of a year during which OSTI took steps to re-focus and re-balance our operations by devoting more resources to collecting and preserving DOE STI and to providing comprehensive access to the results of DOE R&D investments.  At the same time, we streamlined our portfolio of science search tools to make it easier to find DOE’s R&D results.  In August, DOE became the first federal science agency to issue a public access plan for scholarly scientific publications in response to a February 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directive, and OSTI launched DOE PAGES^Beta, a beta portal to journal articles and accepted manuscripts resulting from DOE-funded research.  On October 1, we issued the OSTI 2015-2019 Strategic Plan, a roadmap for working to ensure its collections and portals reflect the complete R&D output of DOE.  

As we now implement the OSTI re-organization, I’m excited about aligning our structure and people in ways that strategically support our ongoing re-focus/rebalance efforts, the OSTI Strategic Plan, and our core mission responsibilities to collect, preserve, and disseminate STI.

Under the re-organization, with our operations in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, I lead OSTI and the Office of the Director, including senior staff responsible for administration, communications, and D.C. liaison.  Reporting to me are three OSTI offices focused respectively on collecting, preserving, and disseminating STI.   

The OSTI Office of Acquisition and Information Programs, led by Assistant Director and Chief Program Officer Judy C. Gilmore, is responsible for collecting DOE unclassified STI and also DOE classified, controlled, and sensitive R&D results.  This office spearheads the DOE Scientific and Technical Information Program, a collaboration of STI liaisons from DOE program, field, site, and procurement offices, national laboratories, and research facilities who work to ensure that the results of DOE-funded R&D are identified and collected.  This office also manages STI policy development, program office coordination, the corporate E-Link STI submission system, dataset registration, acquisition and receipt metrics, and OSTI’s work providing secure information services to DOE and the National Nuclear Security Administration.   

The OSTI Office of Preservation and Technology, led by Assistant Director and Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey S. Given, is responsible for the long-term preservation of DOE R&D results and OSTI’s IT infrastructure.  This office is accountable for records management, academic research partnerships, usage and performance metrics, and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) administration.  This office also manages IT, cyber, and network operations for OSTI’s vast public-facing STI collections, as well as safeguards and security, sensitivity reviews, and disaster recovery and continuity of operations.

The OSTI Office of Access and Operations, led by Associate Director and Chief Integration Officer Mark A. Martin, is responsible for managing and disseminating the entire OSTI Catalogue of Collections, including OSTI’s DOE STI products and the science information resources it hosts in partnership with U.S. federal science agencies and global science counterparts.  This office is accountable for all facets of making DOE unclassified R&D results accessible, including OSTI strategic and operational planning, public access initiatives, cross-cutting operational integration, product policy, STI systems support, metadata quality and curation, applications software maintenance, and software development.

Of course, an organization’s structure isn’t a recipe for success.  It’s the organization’s philosophy of customer service, its sense of purpose, its embrace of change and innovation, the commitment of each and every employee – and ultimately a lot of hard work – that have made OSTI successful.  The placement of the “boxes” simply needs to make clear who owns strategic goals, to reflect our core priorities and functions, and then to remove any barriers to innovation and excellence.  Our structure will continue to evolve when needed.  In the meantime, I’m pleased to announce this structure and the top-notch leadership and teams we have in our three new line organizations.

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 Brian A. Hitson was named Director of the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information in September 2014.