OSTI.gov Newsletter | OSTI, US Dept of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information

"The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has been making research and development (R&D) findings available to researchers and the public since 1947. Over the years, OSTI has been innovative in adapting to changing circumstances to fulfill its core mission of collecting, preserving and disseminating all forms of scientific and technical information (STI) from DOE.  Since the earliest days of the Information Age, OSTI has been a leader in making the web work for science, creating collections of digitized STI, establishing an energy science and technology virtual library and developing and adopting cutting-edge web tools such as federated search and relevancy ranking of results. Now OSTI is focused on meeting a new challenge that is also a momentous opportunity: providing public access to the gold standard of DOE scientific communications, peer-reviewed journal articles and accepted manuscripts resulting from DOE research investments. DOE Public Access Plan and Gateway In February 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum, 'Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,' that calls on federal science agencies such as DOE to develop and implement public access plans for making accepted manuscripts and peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and scientific data in digital formats resulting from agency research investments publicly available in timely fashion. OSTI helped draft the DOE plan for providing public access to scientific publications and scientific data in digital formats that was submitted to OSTP last fall. OSTI also has developed a DOE public access portal that will make scholarly scientific publications resulting from DOE research funding publicly accessible and searchable at no charge to readers. OSTP has reviewed and provided feedback on DOE’s draft public access plan, and DOE will respond to that feedback before implementing its public access solution.  As it prepares to lead implementation of public access to scholarly publications for DOE, OSTI is focusing more than ever on its core mission and re-allocating resources to meet the public access challenge ..."