OSTI's Commitment to Improving Lives by Accelerating Science Discovery

OSTI provides searchable access to vast collections of DOE research results, project descriptions, and accomplishments. Making R&D findings available and usable is central to OSTI's mission:

The mission of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is to advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to Department of Energy (DOE) researchers and the American people.

Lives are improved as a direct result of great discoveries. Researchers require vast quantities of scientific information to make these discoveries and they need this information quickly. OSTI's innovation in pioneering and constantly expanding the frontiers of the nation's cyberinfrastructure ensures that critical information will be quickly and effectively distributed in ways that serve those who can best utilize this information.

Expertise and innovation in knowledge management and knowledge diffusion are critical to OSTI's ability to quickly push new information to the edges of the cyberinfrastructure and to making these findings usable. OSTI ensures effective knowledge management through a constant process of developing and improving key databases and resources. These resources not only make scientific findings searchable, they make searching effective. Through innovation in parallel searching of multiple resources, relevance ranking, and other pioneering technologies OSTI is ensuring that the most useful information will be found quickly even as the rate of growth in its collections rapidly accelerates.

Knowledge diffusion works together with knowledge management to ensure the rapid spread of useful information. OSTI's diffusion research team is measuring and modeling the spread of ideas, exploiting similarities in the well-developed mathematics that describes infectious disease. Preliminary findings indicate that the diffusion of knowledge can be accelerated by increasing the rate at which scientists are exposed to one another's ideas. The potential impact of diffusion research is well expressed in this excerpt from the introduction to the Report for the Office of Scientific and Technical Information: Population Modeling of the Emergence and Development of Scientific Fields:

Innovation has often been linked with prosperity and growth and, consequently, trying to understand what drives scientific innovation is of extreme interest. Identifying sets of population characteristics, factors, and mechanisms that enable scientific communities to remain at the cutting edge, accelerate their growth, or increase their ability to re-organize around new themes or research topics is therefore of special significance. Yet generating a quantitative understanding of the factors that make scientific fields arise and/or become more or less productive is still in its infancy. This is precisely the type of knowledge most needed for promoting and sustaining innovation. Ideally, the efficient and strategic allocation of resources on the part of funding agencies and corporations would be driven primarily by knowledge of this type.

Critical to accelerating diffusion of science knowledge is leading edge technology. The DOE Science Accelerator was developed by OSTI to meet the need of scientists and science-attentive citizens to efficiently conduct research among the vast collections of scientific sources. The DOE Science Accelerator allows for exploration of the deep Web, which contains specialized databases of scientific information that are not accessible to surface crawlers such as Yahoo! and Google. OSTI laid the foundation in 2002, with the introduction of Science.gov, for searching major databases of federal science agencies from a single application. The DOE Science Accelerator greatly broadens the scope of useful information that is available to researchers and the public with a single search.

OSTI's never-ending commitment to combining proven science with innovation provides the fuel that accelerates scientific discovery, which in turn improves lives.

Walter L. Warnick, Ph.D.

Director, OSTI