OSTI and ORCID: Working to Help Link DOE Authors and Their Research Resultsby Catherine Pepmiller 20 Sep, 2016 in It has always been important for authors and researchers to maintain and present accurate records of their work and experience. In this digital age, an author can achieve such record-keeping by using a persistent digital identifier, a number associated with a particular author that remains with him or her, regardless of changes in discipline, research project, organization, or position. ORCID, a not-for-profit-organization working to make it easier to connect research results to authors, has stepped in to provide just such a service. To date, they have registered over 2.5 million ORCID iDs for their users, and this number grows daily. ORCID first opened its registry allowing researchers to register ORCID iDs and link their works to their iD in 2012, and the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) was one of the first federal organizations to embrace the ORCID concept. In spring 2013, OSTI moved to help make it even easier for researchers to employ ORCID iD by offering the option to submit scientific and technical information (STI) records including an ORCID iD via E-Link, the DOE corporate STI ingest system. Once records have been processed, users may search SciTech Connect by ORCID iD to find works associated with that iD. Under this system, authors curate their ORCID Works list manually, adding records... Related Topics: orcid, osti, SciTech Connect Read more... |
The In-Between World of the Mesoscaleby Kathy Chambers 23 Jun, 2015 in
George Em Karniadakis is one of the notable mesoscale researchers who are changing what we know about medicine. Dr. Karniadakis, a joint appointee with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Brown University, serves as principal investigator and director of the Collaboratory on Mathematics for Mesoscopic Modeling of Materials (CM4), a major project sponsored by the Applied Mathematics Program within the DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR). CM4 focuses on developing rigorous mathematical foundations for understanding and controlling fundamental... Related Topics: SciTech Connect Read more... |
SciTech Connect, Primary Repository for DOE Scientific and Technical Information, Turns Twoby Catherine Pepmiller 02 Apr, 2015 in Products and Content
SciTech Connect is a publicly available database of bibliographic citations for energy-related scientific and technical information (STI), including technical reports, journal articles, conference papers, books, multimedia, and data information. Launched in March 2013 by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), SciTech Connect incorporated the contents of two of the most popular core DOE collections, DOE Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database, and employed an innovative semantic search tool and updated interface to enable scientists, researchers, and the public to retrieve more relevant information. SciTech Connect has emerged as a go-to resource, becoming OSTI’s most-visited repository for DOE science, technology, and engineering research information. Currently, it offers users over 2.7 million citations, including 400,000 full-text documents and nearly 1.5 million journal article citations, 240,000 of which have digital object identifiers (DOIs) with links to publishers’ websites. During its two year history, SciTech has recorded over 3 million sessions with a total of 5,180,000 pageviews. Following the discontinuation of Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database in September 2013, SciTech Connect traffic has been responsible for the majority of the pageviews served by OSTI’s DOE core-mission products. Since the beginning of fiscal year 2014, SciTech Connect has had an average rate of 6.17 pageviews per minute and served nearly 2.2 million users. SciTech Connect is unique amongst OSTI’s products due to its innovative semantic search strategy to encourage STI... Related Topics: SciTech Connect Read more... |
DOE Open Government Plan 3.0 Highlights OSTI Productsby Peter Lincoln 24 Jun, 2014 in
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... Related Topics: collaboration, National Library of Energy (NLE) - Beta, open government plan, ScienceCinema, SciTech Connect, transparency, WorldWideScience.org (WWS) Read more... |
OSTI Is Re-Focusing and Re-Balancing Its Operations – And Refreshing Its Home Page – to Advance Public Accessby Dr. Jeffrey Salmon 03 Mar, 2014 in Products and Content
Let’s call it creative destruction, borrowing from a popular term in economics. The idea is that the very essence of capitalism is the destruction of old structures and the building of new ones that inevitably face the same pressures as the structures they replaced. It’s the reason the buggy whip industry fell on hard times. The information management business of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is in constant flux too, where the next big thing can soon become the next big flop. OSTI cannot be immune to these disruptive forces, nor would we wish it to be. Here, I would like to focus on just one of many disruptive forces in the information management and information technology worlds compelling OSTI to change, the push for greater public access to federally-funded R&D results. Frankly, it’s a disruptive force we welcome. Increasingly the legislative and executive branches of government have emphasized public access to federally-funded scholarly publications (i.e., journal articles and accepted manuscripts) and digital datasets. OSTI will lead the implementation of public access to scholarly publications for DOE, just as the organization has offered public access to other forms of scientific and technical information (STI) emanating from DOE and its predecessor agencies for the past 67 years. To this end, OSTI is re-focusing and re-balancing its resources, operations, and priorities. For OSTI, this means looking first and foremost at the STI produced by DOE and serving DOE R&D interests. OSTI is working to be as comprehensive as possible in its processes to collect, preserve/curate, and disseminate all forms of STI from DOE. This means that the DOE Scientific and Technical Information Program, or STIP, is of paramount importance. STIP is a robust and effective collaboration across the DOE... Related Topics: .EDUconnections, Adopt-A-Doc, DOE Green Energy, DOE STI, journal literature, National Library of Energy (NLE) - Beta, osti, OSTI Homepage, Science Accelerator, Science Conference Proceedings, ScienceLab, SciTech Connect
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A banner year expected for high-performance computingby Kathy Chambers 05 Feb, 2014 in Science Communications
Just seven miles south of our OSTI facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee is a national treasure – the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). ORNL is DOE’s largest multi-program laboratory where remarkable scientific expertise and world-class scientific facilities and equipment are applied to develop scientific and technological solutions that are changing our world. ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences is home to two of ORNL’s high-performance computing projects -- the National Climate-Computing Research Center (NCRC), where research is dedicated to climate science, and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). OLCF delivers the most powerful computational resource in the U.S. for open science, allowing the world’s best computational researchers an opportunity to tackle problems that would be unthinkable on other systems. OLCF has such a remarkable history. It was established in 2004 to deliver a supercomputer 100 times more powerful than the leading systems of the day. Its Cray XT4 Jaguar ran the first scientific applications to exceed 1,000 trillion calculations a second (1 petaflop) in 2008. In preparation for the exascale, OLCF elicited petascale computational science requirements from the international science community and began to prepare for next-generation science. OLCF continued to expand the limits of the Jaguar in 2011 to deliver a peak performance of more than 2.3 petaflops becoming the world’s most powerful supercomputer. OLCF has now upgraded the Jaguar to... Related Topics: High-performance computing, Jaguar, ORNL, SciTech Connect, Titan Read more... |
Before and after CrossRefby Dr. Walt Warnick 19 Dec, 2013 in Personal Perspectives
It is truly wonderful when something comes along that speeds access to science. Such is the case with CrossRef’s linking network for scholarly literature. Anyone that has ever done a literature search prior to 2000 is completely blown away today when they encounter the time saved and the quality of CrossRef’s linking service. I vividly recall my own literature review for my PhD dissertation almost 40 years ago and I want to share my story. For many long and miserable days and nights for a solid month I practically lived at the University of Maryland’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Library plowing through a massive set of numerous volumes of citation indices looking up keywords related to my dissertation. My topic Secondary deflections and lateral stability of beams was based on my research at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. None of my faculty had specialized in such topics and so my task was monumental-- do a full blown literature review from scratch. I would write down suspected relevant citations and walk through the extensive stacks of the library where I could locate the journal, find the right volume of the journal, and examine the article. Since the indexing contained minimal information, most of the time the articles weren’t relevant and much of my effort was fruitless. When I got lucky and found a relevant article, I had to copy the citation information and meat of the article by hand. Then I had to scour the references in that article and determine if it was necessary to find the referenced journals in the stacks and examine the referenced articles. This is how a dissertation literature review was done before online... Related Topics: CrossRef, dissertation, DOE Data Explorer (DDE), dois, ETDEWEB, FundRef, journal articles, literature review, SciTech Connect Read more... |
Observing Gamma-ray Bursts in Distant Galaxiesby Kathy Chambers 21 Nov, 2013 in Science Communications
Star gazing seems especially good on a clear autumn night. From our back deck our amateur eyes scan the sky and its wonder. We first notice Venus, our closest planetary neighbor. A beautiful harvest moon rises over the hill, lighting up jet streams that crisscross the stars and planets. We see Orion, the bowl and handle of the Big Dipper, the Square of Pegasus, the vast Milky Way and we are fortunate to see an occasional falling star. We are in awe of the beauty of our night sky but it’s what we can’t see that is truly amazing. Spectacular explosions, which can’t be detected with the human eye, light up the gamma-ray sky about once a day. These explosions, called gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), are from distant galaxies hundreds of millions of light years away from earth and are thought to be triggered by supernovae or exploding stars. They release more energy than our sun will put out in a lifetime. GRBs have been an observational and theoretical challenge since they were first observed in the 60s. An ongoing international collaborative effort is working to gain a better understanding of the GRBs, how they are formed and how they affect our universe. Department of Energy scientists like Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) Brenda Dingus and Gus Sinnis are major players in the GMB research. They are both leaders of LANL’s Milagro Gamma-Ray Observatory and the follow-up highly sensitive High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-Ray Observatory (HAWC), a bi-national project between Mexico and the United States. These unconventional telescopes view the universe at very high energies rather than with visible light. You can learn... Related Topics: galaxies, gamma-ray burst, SciTech Connect, supernovae, telescopes Read more... |
Name Ambiguity and ORCIDby Tim Byrne 28 Oct, 2013 in Science Communications
The Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) was one of the first federal organizations to embrace and champion the ORCID concept; the National Institutes of Health is the other. As yet, there are very few DOE authors sending ORCID IDs to OSTI's databases. OSTI is encouraging Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP) representatives across DOE to, in turn, encourage authors at their labs and offices to sign up for an ORCID. Anyone desiring more information about OSTI's participation in ORCID can contact OSTI's Point-of-Contact for ORCID, Jannean Elliott. This SciTech Connect Record has an example of an author with an ORCID ID. If you select this author’s name on the citation screen, you will be given the choice of searching the author's name in SciTech Connect, searching the author's ORCID number in SciTech Connect, or searching the author’s ORCID number at orcid.org for other publications from the author not found in SciTech Connect. While ability to search SciTech Connect by ORCID ID is now available, the search by ORCID number won’t yield many results until we get a significant number of DOE authors registered with ORCID IDs. ORCID’s potential to be useful as a vehicle for connecting journal articles to technical reports is of particular interest to OSTI. This is a long-standing challenge for publishers of scholarly journals, as well as for federal agencies that produce technical reports. For DOE national laboratory contracts, OSTI will rely upon ORCIDs to enable linking between journal articles and associated technical reports. Unlike a grant number, there is no number that uniquely identifies a lab project. While OSTI’s internal reports system captures contract numbers, such numbers cover... Related Topics: author names, disambiguation, identifiers, name ambiguity, orcid, SciTech Connect Read more... |
The Higgs boson - a turning point in historyby Kathy Chambers 19 Aug, 2013 in Products and Content
Turning points in history – things or events that define lasting change in the world we know. The industrial revolution, Henry Ford’s automobile, penicillin, Einstein’s theory of relativity, firsts in aviation and space, the discovery of electricity, and the digital computer invention were some of these turning points. The landmark observation of the long sought Higgs-like particle or boson in July 2012 is such a turning point. The Higgs had been the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model, a theory that describes the fundamental particles of matter and the interactions that work between them. Using massive amounts of data from the Large Hadron Collider, international collaborations announced in March 2013 that new evidence strengthens the case that scientists have discovered a Higgs boson and appears to confirm that a Higgs field really exists. Understanding the mysteries of our universe - why particles have mass and why we and everything about us exist - is just beginning with this discovery. Physicists now have a direction for exploration of the Standard Model and if it should be changed. Read about the Higgs boson experiments, new accelerator designs, and further explorations in Dr. William Watson’s latest white paper ... Related Topics: collaboration, higgs boson, large hadron collider, SciTech Connect, standard model Read more... |
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