PubSCIENCE: The Culmination of a Long DOE Tradition

PubSCIENCE: The Culmination of a Long DOE Tradition
of Scientific and Technical Information Dissemination
Now Brings Information to the Desktop

Walter L. Warnick, Ph.D.
Director
Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI)
Department of Energy (DOE)

Presented at
The Annual Meeting of the Association of American Publishers
Washington, DC
February 7, 2000

I want to thank the Association of American Publishers for the opportunity to tell the story of a new World Wide Web product called "PubSCIENCE." Last fall, PubSCIENCE made news when it was unveiled by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. It was developed by the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information to facilitate searching and accessing peer-reviewed journal literature in the physical sciences and other disciplines of concern to DOE. PubSCIENCE is available for public use through the Government Printing Office's "GPO ACCESS." It can be accessed at http://www.osti.gov/pubscience.

Part of the unique story behind PubSCIENCE is what a long history is associated with it. It is the culmination of an agency=s long tradition of scientific and technical information dissemination that now is bringing information to the desktop.

For over 53 years, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) within the Department of Energy (and its predecessor agencies) has been managing DOE=s technical information program. The origin of this information program was as a library and information policy group for the Manhattan Project. From the beginning the fundamental purpose of this program was to ensure that research results were reported and made available to the agency, other government organizations and their contractors, and the broader scientific community.

The mission of OSTI today is still the same: to collect, preserve, disseminate, and leverage the scientific and technical information (STI) resources of the Department of Energy to provide access to national and global STI for use by DOE, the scientific research community, academia, US industry, and the public in order to expand the knowledge base of science and technology.

Though the mission remains the same, the manner in which it is met is very different.

Until recently, the two major end products for disseminating this information were Nuclear Science Abstracts (NSA) and the Energy Science and Technology Database (EDB). Both these databases contain bibliographic information describing information products B what we term Ainformation about information@ -- and stating their availability for users who sought to obtain full-text copies.NSA is an historic record of nuclear research beginning with the Manhattan Project and following throughout the life of the Atomic Energy Commission. It contains international nuclear science and technology references from the early 1940s through June 1976. With the creation of the Energy Research and Development Administration and then the Department of Energy (DOE) in the 1970s, the scope of the agency was broadened. EDB then supplanted NSA to provide a comprehensive source of worldwide energy-related information, both nuclear and non-nuclear. It covers 1974 to the present and includes information on energy sources, use and conservation, environmental effects, waste processing and disposal, regulatory considerations, as well as basic scientific studies. Its scope mirrors the scope of the DOE R&D program. Together these databases offer more than 5 million records in energy science and technology.

These databases have provided bibliographic information and abstracts for technical reports, journal articles, conference papers and proceedings, dissertations, translations, patents, books, and software.

The Nuclear Science Abstracts publication was distributed to depository libraries at no cost in order to ensure free public access. One might ask why it was distributed for free. Scientific and technical information was, and remains, the principle deliverable stemming from the huge research and development program sponsored by the Federal government. Scientific and technical information is an integral part of that program, much as the white pages are an integral part of the business of the phone company. Access to information stemming from the Federal R&D program is a key part of the utility of that program.

While OSTI is 53 years old, it is committed to remaining modern. It has no choice. Information Age technologies have radically changed OSTI=s information services. OSTI has developed several electronic products to meet the needs of DOE=s research and development (R&D) community and has made them available to the public when appropriate through outlets such as the Government Printing Office. In efforts to better serve the customer, who increasingly needs information at the desktop, OSTI has transitioned its operations from a paper-based environment to an electronic environment.

OSTI=s introduction of the DOE Information Bridge in April 1998 provided access to the full text of DOE-sponsored grey literature (reports, conference papers, etc.). Each word of each report is searchable. Today, the Information Bridge has grown to over 50,000 digital reports and to over 4 million pages. (See http://www.osti.gov/bridge)

With the Information Bridge well established, DOE turned its sights toward the other ways by which scientists disseminate their findings. A critical body of information for researchers is bibliographies of scientific and technical journal literature.

Following the path forged by the National Library of Medicine with its life sciences product, PubMed, and working with the journal operations of the American Physical Society, OSTI determined that the new Web technology could be used to integrate publisher submitted citations and abstracts into a searchable database, utilizing hyperlinks to take users to the publishers= doorstep where full-text information could be obtained. (It is important to note that PubMed is not the same as PubMed Central. PubMed Central is a significant expansion of PubMed in scientific scope and types of literature included. In addition, among the expansions is that PubMed Central makes full-text peer reviewed literature available at no cost to users, whereas PubMed links to full-text at the publishers server. PubSCIENCE is modeled after PubMed.) Finally, in partnership with GPO and 21 publishers, PubSCIENCE was unveiled in October 1999 at a ribbon-cutting ceremony with Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and the U. S. Superintendent of Documents Fran Buckley.

PubSCIENCE citations come from two sources: (1) participating publishers and information intermediaries maintaining citation collections based on agreements negotiated with OSTI, and (2) journal citations historically gathered by OSTI, comprising one of the largest compendia of energy related bibliographic citations available electronically.

PubSCIENCE allows the user to search across abstracts and citations of multiple publishers. Once the user has found an interesting abstract, a hyperlink provides access to the publisher's server to obtain the full-text article. The article will come up immediately if the user or his/her organization has a subscription to the journal. If the user lacks such a subscription, access to the full text can be obtained by pay per view, by special arrangement with the publisher, library access or through commercial providers.

OSTI=s primary patrons are scientists at the DOE system of National Laboratories. PubSCIENCE is particularly attractive to such large institutions, as they are increasingly using site licenses to bring full-text journals to their scientific staffs. At any institution that has a site license hosted at a publisher=s server, the hyperlinks to full-text in PubSCIENCE are automatically live.

Global information sharing has become a reality via the Web, making public availability actually somewhat easier and cheaper to implement than restricting access. The response from users has been quite favorable. For the future, OSTI plans to continue to partner with journal publishers to add more titles to PubSCIENCE, consistent with the scope of the DOE R&D program.

Last February, the President=s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) presented a report envisioning the ways in which information technology could transform how we conduct research. The committee foresaw a time when all scientific and technical journals will be available online and completely searchable. PubSCIENCE goes a long way toward realizing that committee=s vision.

DOE=s most recent Web-based product is the PrePRINT Network, launched on January 31 of this year. The PrePRINT Network is a searchable gateway to preprint servers all across the world which deal with scientific and technical disciplines of concern to DOE. With a single query, users can search one or a collection of existing preprint servers. The Network pulses the search engines of such servers, compiles the results, and returns them to the users. (See http://www.osti.gov/preprint).

With the addition of preprints to OSTI=s suite of Web products and services, the trilogy of ways in which researchers make their results known are now accessible on the Web: grey literature through the DOE Information Bridge; journal literature through PubSCIENCE; and preprints through the PrePRINT Network.

Interestingly, a visionary recommendation was made in a 1991 report commissioned by the American Physical Society. Called the "Loken Report," it called for the development of a National Physics Database to integrate Aall of the world=s scientific literature information in an electronic information system.@ Given the developments I=ve just described, that vision no longer seems such a stretch. Indeed, Loken Report author Dr. Harry Thacker recently said, "I've often thought that the only thing we got wrong in the report was the time scale. We thought we were talking about 2020 and it turned out to be more like 2000." DOE=s Office of Scientific and Technical Information agrees that the time is near for a digital national resource for energy science and technology information.