February 28, 2005
Oak Ridge, TN – The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has agreed to participate in CrossRef, a nationally recognized reference-linking service for scholarly and professional content, in order to facilitate access to the Agency's vast stores of scientific and technical information. OSTI and CrossRef plan to use Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to facilitate the access to and re-use of 90,000 science research reports available electronically on OSTI's Information Bridge (www.osti.gov/bridge). A DOI provides a way to track, exchange, and manage content over time in the digital universe, regardless of changing information related to that content.
"We are pleased to join CrossRef in pioneering this first-of-a-kind government-private partnership," said Dr. Walter Warnick, Director of OSTI. "We believe that coupling the vast resources available on Information Bridge with the reference-linking capabilities of CrossRef will advance OSTI's mission of making DOE research results more accessible."
The Information Bridge serves as an open source for full-text documents reporting DOE-sponsored research in physics, chemistry, materials, biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer and information science, renewable energy, and other topics of interest to the Department. These documents have been generated by the DOE national laboratories, other contractors, and grantees, and range from 1995 to the present. Legacy documents are included as they become available in electronic format.
OSTI is the largest provider of "gray literature" reports to join CrossRef since CrossRef began late last year to include publishers of working papers and technical reports among its members.
According to CrossRef Executive Director Ed Pentz, this agreement is part of CrossRef's mission "to provide the most robust citation linking network possible, cutting across publishers, business models, and content types." The 14.3 million DOIs registered in CrossRef to date point mainly to journal articles, books, chapters, and conference proceedings. Among its 350 members, CrossRef already includes several open-access publishers.
OSTI's mission is to advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to DOE researchers and the American people. OSTI has been directing the management of research results since 1947. With its suite of Web tools, OSTI is a leader in facilitating the discovery and reuse of government science information.
For more information on OSTI's resources, visit www.osti.gov. For information on CrossRef developments, please visit www.crossref.org.
