The Department of Energy recently issued its latest Open Government Plan, and the document recognizes the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) for advancing open government and the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration by making scientific and technical information (STI) publicly available.
Eleanor Frierson, who passed away in April 2013, was the grande dame of partnerships to improve public access to federal and international science information. For 10 years, she helped spearhead U.S. interagency efforts to make federal science information more accessible to Americans, playing an absolutely crucial leadership role on the Science.gov Alliance. She took Science.gov all the way from a nascent concept through to its maturation. Ms. Frierson also made similar contributions to the international science portal, WorldWideScience.org.
For many years, scientific information was provided primarily in text-based formats, such as journal articles, conference proceedings, and technical reports. Increasingly, however, scientists are communicating through multimedia formats (images, videos), and via direct access to their scientific data sets. Information users face some unique challenges in finding scientific information, particularly when it can take several forms. Imagine that a climatologist has created data sets detailing precipitation measurements for the North Slope of Alaska. The climatologist might present these findings first at a meteorological conference, and the presentation might be taped and made available as a video of the conference. Later, the climatologist publishes one or more technical reports, referring to the original data sets. How does a user find all this relevant information?
Oak Ridge is rapidly emerging from a secret city into the hub of open science information. How did this happen? It’s an amazing story.
In 1942, deep within the quiet farm hills of East Tennessee, a secret city called Oak Ridge was created seemingly overnight. Approximately 75,000 workers worked tirelessly to refine uranium ore into fissionable material. When the first atomic bomb was dropped in Japan and World War II came to an end, their work for the Manhattan Project was revealed to them and to the world. Their secret is still commemorated today. Oak Ridge, Tennessee has much to be proud of: Science created its beginning and science continues to be vital to its future.
WorldWideScience.org now offers the capability to search scientific data collections. Six new data sources have been added to WWS.org, representing a significant milestone in improving access to scientific data from around the world. Users seeking scientific datasets can conduct a real-time, one-stop search and immediately gain access not only to the metadata but to the actual scientific data itself.
“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.”
~Albert Einstein
As you prepare your taxes, keep in mind that April is Mathematics Awareness Month. This year’s theme is, “Mathematics, Statistics and the Data Deluge”.
Mathematics is used throughout the world as an essential tool in many fields, including natural science, engineering, medicine and the social sciences. Large amounts of data are collected every day, and scientific data comes in massive amounts from supercomputers, sensor networks, astronomical instruments and other devices. These data need to be sorted out and understood in order to be useful.
Sometimes something complex can work so seamlessly that it’s easy to miss. We think that’s the case with our solution in achieving search interoperability.
As you may know, “search interoperability” is just a fancy way of saying that lots of scientific databases scattered far and wide can be made to work together so that your job as a seeker of science information is easy. You can go to one search box, say Science.gov, type in your search term, and get results from over a hundred important repositories and a couple of thousand scientific websites – with one click.
International Education Weekwas first held in 2000; today it's celebrated annually in more than 100 countries worldwide. IEW is a joint initiative of the US Departments of Stateand Education, and is part of the federal government’s efforts to promote programs that prepare Americans for a global environment and attract future leaders from abroad to study, learn and exchange experiences in the United States.
Science and technology have been and will continue to be engines of US economic growth and national security. Excellence in discovery and innovation in science and engineering and in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education will strengthen the US economy, increase the capacity of US research and sustain our nation’s leadership role in increasingly competitive international science.
In an October 29, 2011 Wall Street Journal article, “The New Einsteins Will Be Scientists Who Share,” Dr. Michael Nielsenstated that networked science has the potential to speed up dramatically the rate of discovery across all of science, and that we may well see the day-to-day process of scientific research change more fundamentally over the next few decades than over the past three centuries. He also noted that there are major obstacles to achieving this goal, including the lack of a systematic effort by scientists to adopt new tools of discovery or to share data – because they are busy, they may believe it’s a diversion from their “real” work or because they may not be familiar with the means to do so easily.
OSTI knows that the public and members of the scientific community may not be familiar with the multitude of different science databases. OSTI addresses and solves these considerable challenges by providing vehicles for obtaining targeted, precise information quickly and easily.
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