OSTI contribution to President's "Big Data Research and Development Initiative"

In the age of Big Data, OSTI is playing a key role [2] to ensure the impact of DOE research is tracked and that a scholarly structure is in place to reward data producers. On Thursday, the White House released its Big Data Research and Development Initiative, and OSTI, the U.S. federal agency member of DataCite (a global consortium of leading scientific and technical information organizations), was recognized as playing a "key role" in shaping the policies and technical implementation of the practice of data citation. Data citation enables efficient reuse and verification of data [3], and OSTI recently implemented its Data Identification Service across the DOE complex. Through the OSTI Data ID Service [4], Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are assigned to research datasets, and then registered with DataCite to establish persistence. This initiative makes DOE datasets findable in commercial search engines (e.g. Google) and through federated search portals for science such as the DOE portal ScienceAccelerator.gov, the U.S. gateway Science.gov and the global search engine WorldWideScience.org. The importance of this undertaking is conveyed in the Administration's initiative [5], which states "By improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, the initiative promises to help solve some the Nation's most pressing challenges."