In August 2014, the Department of Energy (DOE) launched a search tool providing access to final-peer-reviewed manuscripts of published articles of work sponsored by DOE. This search tool, DOE PAGES®, was developed and is maintained by DOE's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). DOE PAGES offers free, public access to the best available full-text version of DOE-funded scholarly publications - either the peer-reviewed, accepted manuscript or the published scientific journal article - after an administrative interval of 12 months. Over 150,000 publicly available full-text journal articles and accepted manuscripts are currently accessible in DOE PAGES, and the collection continues to grow by 20,000-30,000 publicly-accessible articles and manuscripts a year.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a requirement for federal agency public access plans in 2013. DOE published its Public Access Plan (link is external) for increasing availability of DOE-funded research results in 2014, a model that met OSTP's requirement for enhancing innovation and competition among science- and research-driven businesses and other entities. DOE PAGES is the cornerstone of the DOE Public Access Plan and ensures long-term preservation and access to DOE-funded research results.
Even before the OSTP call for public access plans, OSTI's mission, defined in legislation, has been to publicly disseminate DOE's R&D results. OSTI leads the DOE-wide program under which national lab and grantee researchers send their research results to OSTI for public dissemination. Augmenting this infrastructure, OSTI has also partnered with like-minded external organizations to expand avenues to access. As a founding participant in Crossref's FundRef project, DOE worked with the publishing community to provide an accurate taxonomy of agency funding sources to link to published scholarly research. OSTI also collaborates with CHORUS, a consortium of publishers working to facilitate access to scholarly publications consistent with government mandates. Working with partner organizations complements OSTI's existing infrastructure and allows OSTI to broaden and enhance DOE research result offerings.
OSTI's commitment to public access doesn't end with scholarly publications. Over the years, OSTI has worked to provide access to DOE-funded software and data, increasing the usability and visibility of different types of R&D results to further encourage collaboration and learning. DOE CODE is a software platform and search tool containing records for DOE-funded scientific and business software and links to the software or code repository. DOE CODE is an open source platform that offers code repository services for DOE developers in OSTI's open source GitHub community repository, reflecting the needs expressed by DOE researchers and developers. OSTI also hosts DOE Data Explorer (DDE), a search tool for finding DOE-funded, publicly available, scientific data from data centers, repositories, and other organizations funded by DOE. While the data themselves reside at their originating organizations, OSTI provides records of the datasets and offers free DOI registration and assignment for DOE-funded datasets.
For seventy-five years, OSTI's mission has been to collect, preserve, and disseminate DOE's research and development (R&D) results, and it continues to evolve alongside the ever-changing scientific landscape to accelerate scientific discovery. OSTI's efforts and success in public access has helped facilitate the advancement of R&D faster than ever before. For more details on DOE and OSTI's commitment to public access, see OSTI's Public Access Policy and a complete list of OSTI's Search Tools.