BRIAN A. HITSON ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OFFICE OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL INFORMATION OFFICE OF SCIENCE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY JANUARY 29, 2013 Improving Access to U.S Department of Energy R&D Results Agency/Publisher Collaboration
U.S Federal Research Budget by Agency Department of Energy is largest U.S. funder of physical sciences ~ $5B.
Most immediate output of this investment is Scientific and Technical Information (STI)... which comes in many forms: Journal articles Technical reports Conference papers Theses/Dissertations Scientific and technical computer software Datasets Patents Workshop reports Videos Accepted manuscripts
Public Dissemination Obligations Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954 established a program for the dissemination of unclassified scientific and technical information and for the control of classified information. Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 defined responsibilities for developing, collecting, and making scientific and technical information available for distribution. Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977 provided for maintaining a central source of information and disseminating information. Energy Policy Act of 2005 “The Secretary, through the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, shall maintain within the Department publicly available collections of scientific and technical information resulting from research, development, demonstration, and commercial applications activities supported by the Department.” U.S. Government has long recognized its responsibilities to publicly disseminate unclassified STI.
Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) Mission Advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to Department of Energy (DOE) researchers and the public. Premise: Science advances only if knowledge is shared Corollary: Accelerating the sharing of scientific knowledge accelerates the advancement of science Premise: Science advances only if knowledge is shared Corollary: Accelerating the sharing of scientific knowledge accelerates the advancement of science
DOE STI Program OSTI manages agency-wide program. DOE R&D results are: Collected from DOE offices, labs, and facilities, as well as university grantees; Preserved for re-use; and Made accessible via multiple web outlets. Interagency and international exchanges/partnerships leverage access and use of DOE R&D results.
OSTI Dissemination Products & Discovery Tools We produce search tools that make DOE R&D results available.
Federated Products Covers a range of R&D results (reports, patents, citations, eprints, etc.) from DOE. Databases and websites offer over 200 million pages of science information from the U.S. government. Provides over 400 million pages of science information from databases and portals in 70+ countries.
Usage metrics OSTI Web Traffic 300M page views/downloads in FY 2012 70% from domestic sources 30% from international sources Majority of domestic traffic from.com domains
JOURNAL ARTICLES Key remaining “gap” is in DOE’s ability to fully account for and provide access to its scholarly literature output...
Collaboration #1: FundRef Problem: U.S. Federal agencies can’t easily account for scholarly literature output Standard metadata has not included funding source information Solution: FundRef – a pilot to standardize funding source information for scholarly publications
Specific Task: Add ‘agency name’ metatag and contract/grant number to CrossRef metadata. Final report/recommendations expected March 2013 Goal: To standardize funding information within the body of regular metadata collected by scholarly publications for submission to CrossRef. The FundRef Pilot PublishersFunders American Institute of Physics (AIP)US Department of Energy American Psychological Association (APA)US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Elsevier ScienceUS National Science Foundation IEEEWellcome Trust Nature Publishing Group Oxford University Press Wiley
Key features: Standard agency naming conventions Authors to select agency name/sub-program and provide contract/grant number Publishers capturing data in production workflows Depositing the data with CrossRef Displaying the information on published articles Disseminating the data back to funding agencies and others
Collaboration #2: ORCID Will the real John Smith please stand up? Open Researcher and Contributor ID Provides a persistent, unique digital identifier for researchers and authors. Supports automated linkages between them and their submitted works. Distinguishes their research activities from those of others with similar names. Early in 2013 OSTI will begin to support submittal of ORCID identifiers as part of author name information. Once this system is in place, it will be possible to accurately locate records based on an author’s ORCID ID.
Collaboration #3: OSTI-Publisher Metadata- Sharing and Linking Agreements Goal: Improve visibility and usage of DOE research results through reciprocal links from OSTI and publisher products.
DOE-Affiliated Articles by Publisher ( ) Source: Web of Science Elsevier 21% American Chemical Society 19% American Physical Society 18% American Institute of Physics 8% Institute of Physics 7% Wiley 6% Springer 4%
Roles/Functions PublisherOSTI Provides metadata, abstracts, and full text for DOE-affiliated articles to OSTI. Indexes full text and metadata to improve search. Develops reference links from articles to OSTI-held technical reports. Displays metadata and abstracts, but not full text to users. Provides a DOI link to the publisher’s website. “Pushes” metadata (but not abstracts or full text articles) to third parties (e.g., Google, discovery services, universities) via XML services.
Current Publisher Partners: AIP, Elsevier, APS, American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) Discussions underway with other primary publishers
Key Benefits of these Agreements Improves DOE’s ability to more fully account for its scholarly (article) output. Provides the public a better mechanism to find DOE scholarly output without having to use multiple search engines. Drives web traffic to publishers and the Version of Record. Increases opportunities for reference linking across different types of STI (i.e., articles, technical reports, datasets).
Relationship between “Public Access” & the OSTI-Publisher Agreements These agreements represent a step forward in public access. Agency-funded scholarly literature becomes easier to account for and find. They do not fulfill the broadly-understood meaning of “public access.” (Unless the particular journal or article is already provided as “open access” or becomes accessible after an embargo period)
Potential Next Steps The OSTI-Publisher agreements demonstrate the workability of a hybrid/distributed approach to public access – if decisions are made to pursue public access. Centralized metadata Decentralized full text Article (Version of Record) at publisher website Accepted manuscript at author’s institution or other host site U.S. Executive and Legislative branches of government are considering broader implementation of “public access” beyond the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and PubMed Central.
Conclusions OSTI welcomes the participation of additional publishers in these metadata-sharing agreements. OSTI recognizes and appreciates the value publishers add to scholarly literature. OSTI continues to seek win-win-win arrangements to ensure the dissemination and sustainability of scholarly publications that support: (a) The public and scientific/academic communities; and (b) The publishers; and (c) DOE.
Brian A. Hitson Thank You!