“GATEWAY CELEBRATION” SET FOR
SCIENCE.GOV ON NOVEMBER 7
Oak Ridge Road To Be Renamed “Science.Gov Way”
 

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -  The Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the Oak Ridge Chamber of Commerce and the City of Oak Ridge are planning a “Gateway Celebration” for Friday, November 7, to commemorate Science.gov, the Internet portal hosted in Oak Ridge by DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), as the first government portal established for multi-agency science information.

The event, which will begin at 12:00 noon, will be held outside the OSTI facility located at 175 Oak Ridge Turnpike, Oak Ridge, TN. 

Oak Ridge Mayor David Bradshaw, Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Director of DOE’s Office of Science, senior DOE and Oak Ridge National Laboratory management, other agency partners of Science.gov, and additional local dignitaries are scheduled to participate in activities that will include the renaming of Athens Road located adjacent to OSTI to “Science.gov Way.”  OSTI’s address will become 1 Science.gov Way.

“This street re-naming ceremony is a wonderful way to highlight Oak Ridge’s transformation from the ‘secret city’ of the 1940s into the hub it has become today for information about all federal government research and development results,” said Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham.

“OSTI has been the gateway for DOE’s scientific and technical information for more than 50 years,” Secretary Abraham said, “and now, as the home of Science.gov, OSTI continues to expand and provide this free service via the Web portal open to all science-attentive citizens.  The government partnership that created Science.gov is making our nation’s science knowledge base more openly available than ever before.”

From Science.gov, users can find over 1,700 government information resources about science.  These include technical reports, journal citations, databases, Federal Web sites, and fact sheets.  The information is all free and no registration is required.

Science.gov is for the educational and library communities, as well as business people, entrepreneurs, agency scientists, and anyone with an interest in science.  Support for building the Science.gov gateway came from an interagency committee of senior managers of Federal science and technology information programs.

The agencies participating in Science.gov are the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, and Interior; the Environmental Protection Agency; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; the National Science Foundation; the Government Printing Office; and the National Archives and Records Administration.

OSTI houses the world’s most comprehensive collection of energy-related information.  This vast national resource, most of it managed electronically, is available to industry, academia, and the general public through the Internet. 

OSTI was established in the mid-1940s by the Atomic Energy Commission, the predecessor agency to DOE, to manage and provide access to nuclear information generated during the Manhattan Project.  Over the years, the scope has expanded along with the missions of the Energy Research and Development Administration and the current Energy Department.  Under DOE, the office has been responsible for the Department-wide scientific and technical information program and covers the various science disciplines of interest.  Today, OSTI represents a valuable national resource, hosting a vast collection of worldwide scientific research results and providing Web-based tools and capabilities to make information easily accessible and usable.

OSTI hosts the Science.gov Web site, partnering with 11 other federal agencies to make much of the government’s science information accessible through the site. This includes more than 400 DOE information collections.  A distributed Deep Web search capability for the site, also developed by OSTI, allows users to search and navigate the content of multiple databases with a single query, regardless of which agency hosts the databases or how the data is stored.

-DOE-

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