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Get scientific e-prints

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Get scientific e-prints

The E-print Network provides a vast, integrated network of electronic scientific and technical information created by scientists and research engineers active in their respective fields, all full-text searchable.  Documents such as these are the means by which today’s scientists and researchers communicate their recent findings to their colleagues and by which they propose new ideas of how the world works to their peers for their collective judgment.  Documents such as these then are of the sort that becomes the central body of scientific information.  While the E-print Network is intended for use by scientists, engineers, and students at advanced levels, it is freely available for all users.

The gateway provides access to over 35,000 websites and numerous research databases worldwide containing over 5.5 million e-prints in basic and applied sciences in areas such as physics, computer and information technologies, biology and life sciences, environmental sciences, materials science, chemistry, nuclear sciences and engineering, energy research, and other disciplines of interest to DOE.

Related Topics: colleagues, documents, E-Print Network (EPN), e-prints, full text, physics, researchers, science, scientists, searchable

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The Amazingly Egalitarian Impact of OSTI's Work

Compared to the pre-Web world of the early 1990s, OSTI now enables about a thousand-fold more information transactions. An information transaction occurs when the customer receives information he requested, such as delivering the results of a search or following a link clicked to display a document. But the mind-boggling growth in the number of transactions is only part of the story.

Today's information transactions often deliver full-text to the OSTI customer, as opposed to bibliographic information. A 100 page report may contain 1000 times as much information as a bibliographic entry. Thus, not only has the number of transactions mushroomed, so has the depth of knowledge conveyed by such transactions. The multiplier is a million or more.

Back in the old days, OSTI's flagship product was "Nuclear Science Abstracts," which provided abstracts of documents and journal articles together with information about where the document or article could be found.  To be of the most value, the customer had to obtain the full-text document or journal article, but the technology of that day meant that the customer was left to his own devices to obtain the full text.  Typically, only users on the premises of a large university library or other major library could access full text.  Being able to visit and use such a facility was, and remains, a privilege available to only a small number of people.

The situation today is starkly different.  Today, the typical user of an OSTI product has immediate access to full text.  No longer need the user be on the premises of a major library.  All he or she needs is internet access anywhere in the country, even around the world. This includes the researchers that DOE funds at hundreds of colleges and universities. It includes the tens of thousands of researchers who use DOE facilities, the million working researchers and tens of millions of students in America, and many more millions around the world.
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Related Topics: full text, osti

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