Accelerating Science Discovery - Join the Discussion

OSTIblog Articles in the electronic documents Topic

Do You Have a Favorite Science Teacher? Adopt-A-Doc in Their Honor

4268

Do You Have a Favorite Science Teacher? Adopt-A-Doc in Their Honor

What is Adopt-A-Doc?  Adopt-A-Doc is another way OSTI is working to increase the availability of important research.  You can be a part of accelerating scientific discovery and help make important research available online by sponsoring the digitization of any adoptable U.S Department of Energy (DOE) technical report.   Your report will be made full-text searchable by DOE search engines like Science Accelerator.gov and Science.gov; as well as be exposed to general purpose search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

The Adopt-A-Doc database currently has over 200,000 technical reports that have not been digitized and are available for adoption.  You may find a technical report that you want to share with others or you think worthy of making broadly available on the web to support the advancement of science.  The Adopt-A-Doc service is available for a nominal fee and allows you to request recognition via a certificate of appreciation indicating that the electronic technical report was made possible by your contribution. The certificate will appear as the first page of the document for the indefinite future.  You may also request an acknowledgment in honor or in memory of a recipient.

For more information, please visit www.osti.gov/adoptadoc, or contact Debbie Nuchols at nucholsd@osti.gov or (865) 576-5699.

Related Topics: Adopt-A-Doc, appreciation, certificate, digitization, electronic documents, honor, memory, scientific information

Read more...

Transparency of Scientific Information

by Mike Jennings 01 Jul, 2009 in Technology

As a coordinator of Web 2 media and product technology at OSTI, I've often wondered whether the stakeholders involved in the development of DOE scientific reports could benefit more from web innovations such as websites, blog sites, subscriptions, and "live" content. The commercial Web and its second generation of Web 2 innovations have certainly been relevant factors in the transparency equation for other types of information on the Web outside of science. Specifically, I suggest that Web innovations would complement electronic document innovations for the transparency of DOE scientific information reports.

The majority of new DOE scientific information is preserved in commercial electronic document formats like the Adobe PDF format which require special software to view and navigate the information. PDF document technology is less useful for certain features. This is especially true for web browsers and mobile devices.

By promoting a mix of conventional and modern Web innovations in DOE's research documentation life-cycle, the following benefits could be realized for DOE scientific and technical information:

  • Conventional websites use hyper-linking to connect a thought written in one document to another thought "anchored" in another document. Perhaps hyper-linking is a better way for one DOE researcher to cite the work of another.
  • Blog sites automatically provide chronological, topical, and subject-relational approaches for studying information whereas electronic documents usually present only one sequential read of the information.
  • Subscription to website content is more convenient.  The RSS and email protocols enable websites and blogs to deliver frequent, bite-size information to mobile devices.  Mobile devices are less able to manage the software needed to access the information stored inside electronic documents. 
  • Electronic documents are mostly static.  But websites use both conventional and modern...

    Related Topics: electronic documents, transparency, web 2.0

    Read more...