Office of Scientific and Technical Information

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Office of Scientific and Technical Information, known as OSTI, holds a mandate written directly into federal law. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 spelled it out plainly: the Secretary of Energy, through OSTI, shall maintain publicly available collections of scientific and technical information from research, development, demonstration, and commercial applications supported by the Department of Energy. That single sentence, buried in Section 982 of Public Law 109-58, defines why this office exists. OSTI is a component of the Office of Science within the U.S. Department of Energy. Its job is deceptively simple: make the science the government pays for available to anyone who wants it. But behind that mission is a decades-long chain of legislation, a portfolio of interconnected databases, and a web of cooperation spanning thirteen federal agencies. What kinds of information does OSTI actually collect, and how did the legal framework that created it take shape across sixty years of energy policy?

• 2. A Legislative Foundation

  ›

  The legal roots of OSTI reach back to 1946, when Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act under Public Law 79-585. That act created the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the earliest federal body charged with managing the country's nuclear science program. Eight years later, in 1954, Congress amended the Atomic Energy Act under Public Law 83-703, refining the government's role in overseeing atomic research. The next major shift came in 1974. The Energy Reorganization Act, Public Law 93-438, split the Atomic Energy Commission into two separate bodies: the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Each took on a distinct part of the original commission's responsibilities. The reorganization did not last long as a final structure. In 1977, the Department of Energy Organization Act, Public Law 95-91, dismantled the Energy Research and Development Administration and replaced it with the Department of Energy. OSTI now sits within that department. Two more laws completed the modern framework: the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the America COMPETES Act of 2007, Public Law 110-69, which together reinforced the federal commitment to sharing publicly funded scientific results.

• 3. The Public Search Tools

  ›

  OSTI.GOV serves as the primary search tool for Department of Energy science, technology, and engineering research and development results. It also functions as the organizational hub for information about OSTI itself. A separate platform, DOE PAGES, handles peer-reviewed scholarly publications. DOE PAGES stands for the DOE Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science, and it makes publications resulting from DOE research funding available to read, download, and analyze at no cost. For software produced with federal dollars, DOE CODE provides an open-source submission and search environment specifically for DOE-funded programs. Researchers looking for visual material can turn to DOE ScienceCinema, a multimedia collection of videos that highlight DOE scientific research. Data-heavy work has its own entry point through DOE Data Explorer, which searches across computer simulations, figures and plots, interactive maps, multimedia, numeric files, and scientific images. DOE Patents rounds out the suite with a searchable database of patent information generated by DOE-sponsored research and development. All of these electronic products can be reached through OSTI's home page, where a single query can search across multiple databases at once.

• 4. Science.gov and Federal Collaboration

  ›

  Science.gov is a USA.gov science portal that OSTI hosts in collaboration with seventeen organizations drawn from thirteen federal science agencies. Those same agencies are members of CENDI, a cooperative group of scientific and technical information managers from those thirteen federal agencies and programs. The portal delivers access to more than 2,100 websites and enables deep web searching of more than fifty databases that contain science information and research and development results. That scale of cooperation, across agencies with different missions and audiences, makes Science.gov one of the broader interagency information efforts in the federal government. OSTI's role as host places it at the center of this collaboration, building on the same public-access philosophy that runs through every tool in its portfolio.