Once again, dedicated representatives from the Department of Energy (DOE) headquarters program offices, field offices, national laboratories and technology centers are convening along with OSTI staff for the DOE Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP) Annual Working Meeting. This year the STIP Annual Working Meeting will be held March 31-April 4 in Richland, Washington. The meeting will be hosted by DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).
Did you ever stop to think what makes it possible for you to have immediate, free access to Department of Energy (DOE) scientific findings from billions of dollars of annual research? A lot of behind-the-scenes work and dedication of an entire community make it all possible.
Many posts could be written about the rich history of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), which dates back to 1945 when Colonel K. D. Nichols announced plans for a complete and authoritative scientific record of all research work performed by Manhattan District contractors. However, I want to focus on a specific slice of that history, one that is going strong and is well represented across the DOE complex. I’m referring to DOE’s Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP, www.osti.gov/stip).
"The unexamined life is not worth living." So says Plato's Socrates in the Apology. His self-examination led to extreme humility (or to an extreme irony) when Socrates confessed to his accusers that the only knowledge he had was knowledge of his own ignorance. No one we know of came away from a Socratic cross-examination in one piece, but they would at least have known their own limits. And in knowing their limits, or their ignorance, they would somehow be better.
I can’t remember how it went now, but as a child I skipped rope to a rhyme that included “would I, could I” somewhere in it.Recently questions were asked about OSTI’s involvement with scientific research data.Is OSTI planning to become a repository for numeric data?Are we going to issue Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for datasets, and would we be telling people how to manage their data?For some reason, the questions triggered the memory of that old refrain, but now I was thinking from an OSTI perspective, “would we, could we…?”
I recently had the opportunity to speak with members of DOE's Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP) at their annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. This is a collaboration that works and is critical to OSTI's success. It is supported by a DOE Order, but there is no compulsion in the order.
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