It is exciting to announce that an array of new search and retrieval features and capabilities have been added to ScienceAccelerator.gov, providing new options for customizing your search experience.

Photo Credit:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Roy Kaltschmidt, Photographer             

In conjunction with the recent selection of Dr. Steven Chu as the next United States Secretary of Energy by President-elect Barack Obama, a quality high-level compilation of information about Dr. Chu and his research has been made available on the web at http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/chu.html.  This web page includes scientific documents that he authored, including his Ph.D. thesis supported by the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA); interviews, speeches, and presentations; and links to related web sites.

The Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has achieved another milestone in our mission of accelerating the diffusion of knowledge to advance science.  Albert Einstein once said that “[t]he only source of knowledge is experience.”  What better way for OSTI to advance science and accelerate the diffusion of knowledge than by joining the Web 2.0 world of social networking.  So, come increase your own knowledge and experience the OSTI Page on Facebook.

Innovation needs information -- the medical innovation model

The goal of energy transformation can take a lesson from America's rapid deployment of innovative medical technologies. It may take a long time to get a new drug or device approved, but once this happens the deployment is very rapid. America's spectacular success in fielding new medical technologies is anchored in the innovative Web resources of the National Library of Medicine. For a modest $350 million a year NLM supplies vast amounts of innovation information to America's scientists, doctors and consumers.

OSTI is driven! We are fully committed to providing scientists and researchers with the social networking tools and services that can make it easier for them to more rapidly advance their scientific research. We have a number of exciting ongoing initiatives in support of accelerating the evolution of science. Here are ten that come to mind:

Two hundred years ago the gulf between the rich and the common people was huge, illustrated by these photos.  On the left is Doughoregan Manor at Ellicott City, Maryland, largely built in the 1700’s, home of Charles Carroll of Carrolton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.  On the right is the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 located at Hodgenville, Kentucky.  Today, the public view of these times is influenced by the fact that many of the fabulous mansions yet survive, while the cabins that housed common people have long since been replaced.

Sources: Wikipedia articles "Abraham Lincoln" and "Doughoregan Manor".

The immediate goal of science is understanding, rather than social utility.  In the rush of day-to-day activity it is easy to overlook how science allows us to live better. The path from science to better lives is complex and often takes decades.  In broad terms, basic research first hands off its results to applied research.  Applied research then hands off to technology research and development, which then flows into entrepreneurship and finally manufacturing and distribution.  Then, and only then, are great benefits realized from science knowledge.

On October 14, OSTI announced that the People's Republic of China had joined the WorldWideScience Alliance. The press release making the announcement described, and hinted at, the importance of China's contribution:

China, a major producer of journals and conference proceedings, is offering searches of key Chinese English-language scientific literature through WorldWideScience.org. The Chinese resource enables searching of over 6,000 journals.

Our team is excited to announce that you can now join in or start discussions on important DOE research and development in the Information Bridge collection.

Our new social networking feature, Document Discussion, has been added to the Information Bridge to provide a forum for moderated, substantive commentary on DOE research and development.

Because we live in a digital world, many people mistakenly believe all research is easily available online. Not only is this a false assumption, it’s not even an easy task to digitize the volume of research currently available in paper format and get it posted online.

That’s why OSTI is pleased to announce that we’ve recently posted 15,000 DOE research reports heretofore only available in paper or microfiche.

Science.Gov 5.0 is now available!

The first thing you’ll notice is the new main page design. The same elements are there, but reconfigured to update the website look and feel. We have also added seven deep web sources (see DOE press release) into the search.

Just as science progresses only if knowledge is shared, accelerating the sharing of knowledge accelerates science. All of us engaged in disseminating science knowledge have the opportunity and obligation to do our jobs better, for to do so accelerates science itself. 

To this end, I propose a grand challenge—to make more science available to, and searchable by, more people than ever before. A momentous milestone will be achieved once we enable everyone with web access the ability to search with unparalleled precision a billion pages of authoritative science. Already, considerable progress has been made. 

Scientific history was made today in Seoul, Korea, as 13 founding members of the WorldWideScience Alliance committed their talents and resources to promoting the global sharing of science.

Our OSTI team recently completed digitizing and uploading to the Information Bridge database about 10,000 documents issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (from 1991 to 1994). This means that citizens can now search this database and rapidly download these documents in full text – all for free.

Today, all of OSTI's information products are on the web. This is in sharp contrast to the situation as recently as the mid-1990s, when OSTI had no products on the web.

First becoming popular in 1994, the web quickly emerged as a transformational technology, and its potential for reshaping OSTI was apparent. Recognizing the opportunity to advance the OSTI mission, OSTI set out to capitalize on it as quickly as resources would allow by producing web applications to disseminate all manner of scientific and technical information (STI). A steady progression of new OSTI products addressed the various forms of STI: technical reports, e-prints, conference proceedings, accomplishments, patents, and project descriptions . To make it easy for users who want to search through all these products at once, we introduced the DOE Science Accelerator, which is powered by our special web architecture called federated search. Reaching out beyond DOE, we initiated a collaboration with other agencies to allow users to search their R&D results along with DOE's; thus emerged Science.gov. Most recently, we took collaboration world wide by federating the best information sources from governments around the world, WorldWideScience which makes searchable about the same quantity of science as does Google.

When it comes to science and technology development, OSTI people are writing one of the biggest Internet success stories. Everyone talks about how the Internet is changing science but OSTI is making it happen, and doing it on a shoestring budget.

This is the third, and final, article in a series. The first article provided an overview of the E-print Network. The second article discussed the special harvested component of the E-print Network in depth. This article provides a tour of the E-print collections which are federated. Hopefully, once you finish reading this article and this series, you will appreciate the innovation and hard work that has gone into producing the premier federated search application for searching E-prints.

This is the final article in a series about the limitations of the crawl and index approach to searching scientific content and the advantages of federated search. Part 1 identified a number of issues with Google and the other crawlers, and showed why researchers and the science attentive citizenry don't rely on "Googleable" content to meet their needs for quality scientific and technical information. Part 2 explained how federated search, by providing access to "non-Googleable" content, overcomes the Google limitations. This article highlights three important applications, developed and maintained by OSTI, that demonstrate how federated search is going beyond crawling to advance science.

This is the second in a three part series of articles about the deficiencies of web crawling and indexing, the superiority of federated search to the serious researcher, and the value of OSTI federated search applications in advancing science. Part 1 identified a number of serious limitations of Google and the other crawlers. This article shows how federated search overcomes these limitations. The final article in the series highlights a number of federated search applications and databases that OSTI makes available to the public.

The web is growing.

For providing searchable access to the content that matters the most to scientists and researchers, Google and the other web crawlers can't keep up. Instead, growing numbers of scientists, researchers, and science attentive citizens turn to OSTI's federated search applications for high quality research material that Google can't find. And, given fundamental limitations on how web crawlers find content, those conducting research will derive even more benefit from OSTI's innovation and investment in federated search in the coming years.

In Part 1 of this series I provided an overview of the technology that drives the E-print Network. In this article I will provide some detail about how the harvested collection, the "E-prints on Web Sites" component of the E-print Network, is constructed. In Part 3, I will discuss the technology of the portion of the E-print Network that relies on federated search of databases.

 Part of OSTI's R&D aims at understanding how scientists use information. This goal was originally articulated by OSTI's Thurman Whitson, who has since retired. To that end we have begun to look at the different kinds of information provided by the different Web-based science resources. Different kinds of information imply different uses. It is not that one resource is better than another overall, it is that they are very different and support different uses.

The E-print Network is one of OSTI's most popular and powerful research offerings yet few of its users know about the advanced technology that drives it and makes it simple to use. Professional researchers in basic and applied science are able to access over 5 million e-prints gathered from nearly 28,000 world-wide databases and web-sites. Numerous OSTI innovations ensure that the E-print Network's documents are of extremely high quality, are highly relevant to researchers, and are easy and quick to find. This is the first in a series of articles about the technology behind this very important component of the Science Accelerator. This article serves as an overview; subsequent articles will provide more technical information.

Federated search is very much at the heart of OSTI's ability to realize its mission. OSTI provides a simple description of what federated search is and how it works in the OSTI environment. The best way to experience the tremendous value of federated search at OSTI is to try several of OSTI's flagship applications:

• Science Accelerator


• Science.gov


• WorldWideScience.org
  
  

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.

Allan Cormack

A young father of two lies in a hospital bed seriously ill. The physician admits he has no treatment. The pancreas is secreting substances that are digesting itself and destroying surrounding tissue. Some patients recover on their own; others simply expire. Only time will tell which fate awaits the young father.

As a staff member involved in OSTI’s Web presence, it was personally satisfying today to hear Google’s J.L. Needham mention OSTI in testimony to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Yesterday my son had an emergency appendectomy – these days a pretty routine procedure. But far from routine was the array of drugs offered to get him through the long night ahead.

In 2005, the idea of creating a global science gateway for the web was conceived at OSTI.  It would make the best collections of scientific information from nations around the world act as if they were a single enormous collection.  It would be searchable via a single query, and it would be available at no cost to anyone anywhere with web access.