Products and Content

 By Walter L Warnick and Peter M. Lincoln

The Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) maintains several collections of scientific and technical information (STI) that can be employed to help achieve the President’s national objectives for the U.S. Department of Energy.

 OSTI’s databases are important resources for scientists and engineers working to strengthen America’s role as the world leader in science and technology, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promote energy security and enhance nuclear security.

Science.gov is a one-stop portal for federal government science information.  Over 200 million pages of science information from 14 federal agencies may be searched through a single query.  How far we have come in the past decade!

You may not be aware that Science.gov was developed and is governed by the Science.gov Alliance, a group of science information managers who began working together to overcome the stovepipes of agency information in 2001.

Unique and interesting insights into U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Research and Development (R&D) accomplishments are available in a special collection that features research of DOE and its predecessor agencies, the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

This special collection contains historically significant government documents that have been specially selected and digitized to make them accessible via the Web. Landmark documents such as The Eightfold Way: A Theory of Strong Interaction Symmetry and The First Weighing of Plutonium are among approximately 300 specially-selected documents included in the database. Additionally, documents are aggregated with related aspects of the collection into more than sixty (60) Feature Topic pages with diverse topics such as Video Games -- Did They Begin at Brookhaven? and Human Genome Research: Decoding DNA.

Did you know that science information is available via web "mashups"? Web "mashups" combine multiple products/services into a single application for the purpose of consolidating information with an easy-to-use interface.

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) uses “mashups” to return search results from Science Accelerator, Science.gov, and WorldWideScience.org. These "mashups" include external sources of information, in these cases from Wikipedia and EurekAlert!, that are provided as a service to the user for help with additional background information or with the ability to further study their topic.

Did you know:

• That now you can find research from China when you search within WorldWideScience.org?  OSTI was in Ottawa June 10 helping formalize the addition of China to the WorldWideScience Alliance? In addition, now you can quickly narrow your WorldWideScience.org results list to the research you need, share them on social networking sites, bookmark your search, and set up alerts.
• That now you can learn about OSTI tools and services on our OSTI YouTube site launched in June?

OSTI is dedicated to the principle that to advance science, research must be shared. OSTI  is increasingly recognized for its contributions to the sharing and exchange of scientific and technical information.  OSTI works to accelerate discovery by speeding access to knowledge.

OSTI’s users conducted 80 million information transactions last year.  Spreading responsibility for these transactions across the OSTI staff implies that each OSTI employee was responsible for 12 information transactions per minute throughout the work year, which I view as an incredible metric of success.   And we have only just begun.  OSTI’s traffic increases significantly each year. 

It is exciting to announce that an array of new search and retrieval features and capabilities have been added to ScienceAccelerator.gov, providing new options for customizing your search experience.

Photo Credit:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Roy Kaltschmidt, Photographer             

In conjunction with the recent selection of Dr. Steven Chu as the next United States Secretary of Energy by President-elect Barack Obama, a quality high-level compilation of information about Dr. Chu and his research has been made available on the web at http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/chu.html.  This web page includes scientific documents that he authored, including his Ph.D. thesis supported by the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA); interviews, speeches, and presentations; and links to related web sites.

The Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has achieved another milestone in our mission of accelerating the diffusion of knowledge to advance science.  Albert Einstein once said that “[t]he only source of knowledge is experience.”  What better way for OSTI to advance science and accelerate the diffusion of knowledge than by joining the Web 2.0 world of social networking.  So, come increase your own knowledge and experience the OSTI Page on Facebook.

Innovation needs information -- the medical innovation model

The goal of energy transformation can take a lesson from America's rapid deployment of innovative medical technologies. It may take a long time to get a new drug or device approved, but once this happens the deployment is very rapid. America's spectacular success in fielding new medical technologies is anchored in the innovative Web resources of the National Library of Medicine. For a modest $350 million a year NLM supplies vast amounts of innovation information to America's scientists, doctors and consumers.

On October 14, OSTI announced that the People's Republic of China had joined the WorldWideScience Alliance. The press release making the announcement described, and hinted at, the importance of China's contribution:

China, a major producer of journals and conference proceedings, is offering searches of key Chinese English-language scientific literature through WorldWideScience.org. The Chinese resource enables searching of over 6,000 journals.

Our team is excited to announce that you can now join in or start discussions on important DOE research and development in the Information Bridge collection.

Our new social networking feature, Document Discussion, has been added to the Information Bridge to provide a forum for moderated, substantive commentary on DOE research and development.

Because we live in a digital world, many people mistakenly believe all research is easily available online. Not only is this a false assumption, it’s not even an easy task to digitize the volume of research currently available in paper format and get it posted online.

That’s why OSTI is pleased to announce that we’ve recently posted 15,000 DOE research reports heretofore only available in paper or microfiche.

Science.Gov 5.0 is now available!

The first thing you’ll notice is the new main page design. The same elements are there, but reconfigured to update the website look and feel. We have also added seven deep web sources (see DOE press release) into the search.

Just as science progresses only if knowledge is shared, accelerating the sharing of knowledge accelerates science. All of us engaged in disseminating science knowledge have the opportunity and obligation to do our jobs better, for to do so accelerates science itself. 

To this end, I propose a grand challenge—to make more science available to, and searchable by, more people than ever before. A momentous milestone will be achieved once we enable everyone with web access the ability to search with unparalleled precision a billion pages of authoritative science. Already, considerable progress has been made. 

Scientific history was made today in Seoul, Korea, as 13 founding members of the WorldWideScience Alliance committed their talents and resources to promoting the global sharing of science.

Our OSTI team recently completed digitizing and uploading to the Information Bridge database about 10,000 documents issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (from 1991 to 1994). This means that citizens can now search this database and rapidly download these documents in full text – all for free.

by Kristin Bingham and Sol Lederman

On June 22, 2007, OSTI opened WorldWideScience.org, a global science gateway, to the public. WorldWideScience.org was an ambitious undertaking and OSTI was the perfect organization to take on the technical, administrative, and organizational challenges to take a powerful idea and bring it to fruition.

When it comes to science and technology development, OSTI people are writing one of the biggest Internet success stories. Everyone talks about how the Internet is changing science but OSTI is making it happen, and doing it on a shoestring budget.