A Journey to Open Access – Part 5 | Tony Hey on eScience

"In a previous entry I wrote about the open access policy of the NIH and their PubMed Central repository. While the NIH has set a great example for open access, it is actually another US funding agency that has been the real pioneer in making the results of its non-classified R&D accessible to both researchers and the general public for over fifty years. This is the DOE, the US Department of Energy—not the NSF as one might have expected. The DOE policy was established in the 1940’s by none other than General Groves, who had led the Manhattan atomic bomb project in such secrecy during the war: 'It was just over 60 years ago that General Leslie Groves, commanding the Manhattan Engineer District in Oak Ridge, TN, mandated that all classified and unclassified information related to the Atomic Bomb be brought together into one central file.' Thus, in 1947, the precursor to the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) was born.  From the OSTI website we read: ‘Established in 1947, DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) fulfills the agency’s responsibilities related to the collection, preservation, and dissemination of scientific and technical information emanating from DOE R&D activities. This responsibility has been codified in the organic, or enabling, legislation of DOE and its predecessor agencies and, more recently, was defined as a specific OSTI responsibility in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.’

The declared mission of OSTI is ‘to advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to DOE researchers and the public’. The Office was founded on the principle that science progresses only if knowledge is shared and the corollary that accelerating the sharing of knowledge accelerates the advancement of science. Although I had interacted with many of the DOE Labs over the years, I am ashamed to say that I only became aware of the activities of OSTI a few years ago..."