The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is working with a researcher in the High Energy Physics (HEP) community to register scientific datasets produced by a domain collaboration, a recent blog post has reported.

OSTI offers a service for registering datasets to help increase access to digital data from DOE-funded scientific research.  Through the DOE Data ID Service, OSTI assigns persistent identifiers, known as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), to datasets submitted by DOE and its contractor and grantee researchers and registers the DOIs with DataCite to aid in citation, discovery, retrieval, and reuse.  OSTI assigns and registers DOIs for datasets for DOE researchers as a free service to enhance the Department of Energy's management of this important resource.

A March 23, 2016, INSPIRE-HEP blog, "DOIs and Lattice QCD Gauge Ensemble Datasets," reports on the efforts of Dr. Jim Simone, a member of the FERMILAB-LATTICE collaboration, to get DOIs assigned to MILC collaboration datasets and then have the records uploaded to INSPIRE, the HEP information system jointly run by CERN, DESY, Fermilab, IHEP, and SLAC.  The MILC research program uses large-scale numerical simulations to study quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong interactions of subatomic physics.

The blog explains why Dr. Simone seeks to register the MILC datasets and how he turned to OSTI for help:

Jim believes DOIs, as public persistent identifiers, are a natural mechanism to identify the datasets, which are public, first class data objects, and permanent.... While INSPIRE is equipped to directly issue DOIs, MILC's direct connection to the U.S. Department of Energy made it practical for DOIs to be issued by [the] DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information.

The DOE Data ID Service is a useful tool for increasing access to digital data, as the DOE Public Access Plan has noted: "The Department's Office of Scientific and Technical Information can provide digital object identifiers to datasets resulting from DOE-funded research.  To improve the discoverability of and attribution for datasets created and used in the course of the research, DOE encourages the citation and identification of datasets with persistent identifiers such as DOIs."

The INSPIRE-HEP blog also reports Dr. Simone's view of his collaboration with OSTI:

For Jim it was a learning experience working with OSTI and interacting with their web services. As one of his main focuses was findability, Jim wanted to include lots of searchable metadata in the dataset records so [as] to help physicists find the particular configurations they wanted.  This amount of metadata was more than OSTI was used to receiving when minting DOIs, but they were able to work with Jim's requests, and he considered them a great help through the entire process.

DOE sponsors research in many different domains, and OSTI works to extend the reach and impact of DOE research results.  OSTI fulfills the agency's responsibilities to collect, preserve, and disseminate scientific and technical information (STI) emanating from DOE research and development (R&D) activities.  OSTI's mission is to advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to DOE researchers and the public. 

OSTI is intent on listening to what DOE researchers do, how they do it, and the challenges they face.  We know that we must be open to tailoring and improving our services based on researchers' needs.  OSTI welcomed Jim Simone's request for assistance on DOIs, as well as the opportunity to ensure that the DOE Data ID Service is useful to a domain-specific resource like INSPIRE, an HEP community archive. 

OSTI will continue to collaborate with Dr. Simone and his HEP colleagues - and we stand prepared to work with other DOE researchers in other collaborations and domains on their need for dataset registration and other STI services.

Sara Studwell is a Librarian and Product Manager for DOE PAGES, DOE Data Explorer, and DOepatents in the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information.