Another opportunity for researchers and the public to be better informed about government research is afforded by OSTI's recent and major update to Federal R&D Project Summaries (www.osti.gov/fedrnd [1]). Three important project summary databases have been added to the portal, which currently provides access to more than 800,000 research projects complete with full-text single-query searching of databases residing at 9 different agencies and organizations. [2] Now you can find research project summaries from the Department of Defense, NASA, and the Transportation Research Board at Federal R&D Project Summaries [1], which helps users find research projects across the federal government.
Updates to the site include:
- Expanded resources by over 30 percent
- Clustering by subtopic and by principal investigator or contact
- An updated look with more robust results
- Ability to narrow results more efficiently by source or sort by various elements
- Ability to email selected results to yourself, your colleagues or your listserv
- Ability to download results into citation management software
Federal R&D Project Summaries was one of OSTI's earliest federated sites which merged the research awards and projects for four, and then later six, federal agencies. It was developed and launched in August 2000, following a May 2000 Workshop on the concept of a Future Information Infrastructure for the Physical Sciences [3] held at the National Academy of Sciences.
Valerie Allen, Product Manager