Short answers, pulled from the story.
OSTI is a component of the Office of Science within the U.S. Department of Energy. Its statutory mandate, set out in Section 982 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, requires it to maintain publicly available collections of scientific and technical information resulting from research, development, demonstration, and commercial applications supported by the Department.
OSTI operates several publicly available tools: OSTI.GOV for DOE science and engineering research results, DOE PAGES for peer-reviewed publications, DOE CODE for DOE-funded software, DOE ScienceCinema for multimedia videos, DOE Data Explorer for scientific datasets, and DOE Patents for patent information from DOE-sponsored research. All can be searched from OSTI's home page with a single query.
The legislative chain begins with the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which created the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 split that commission into the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977 then replaced the Energy Research and Development Administration with the Department of Energy, within which OSTI now operates.
Science.gov is a USA.gov science portal hosted by OSTI in collaboration with seventeen organizations from thirteen federal science agencies. It provides a gateway to more than 2,100 websites and supports deep web searching of more than fifty databases containing science information and research and development results.
CENDI is a cooperative group of scientific and technical information managers drawn from the same thirteen federal agencies and programs that participate in Science.gov. OSTI's role as host of Science.gov places it within this interagency network.
DOE PAGES, the DOE Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science, makes peer-reviewed scholarly scientific publications resulting from DOE research funding publicly accessible to read, download, and analyze. It is freely available to the public.