[BOAI] DOE, IAEA Partner for Greater Access to Nuclear Energy R&D

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from the US Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and 
Technical Information.  --Peter Suber.]


For Immediate Release
October 27, 2009

News Media Contact:			
Cathey Daniels, OSTI
(865) 576-9539	                                               			

DOE, IAEA Partner for Greater Access to Nuclear Energy R&D

OAK RIDGE, TN - The findings from years of nuclear energy research 
supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) and predecessor agencies are 
being made searchable on the World Wide Web, due to a collaborative project 
between DOE and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). By adding 
valuable nuclear-related research to the online collections of both the DOE 
and the IAEA, access to this knowledge by researchers, academia and the 
public interested in the peaceful aspects of nuclear energy is greatly 
facilitated.

As part of its knowledge preservation mandate, the IAEA, through the 
International Nuclear Information System (INIS), is digitizing historic 
nuclear energy research documents dating from 1970 through the early 1990s. 
These documents have been provided by member states over the years, 
including more than 180,000 documents from the DOE Office of Scientific and 
Technical Information (OSTI). OSTI, within the Office of Science, is the 
U.S. representative to INIS and has had its own digitization focus in 
recent years.

This novel partnership highlights the longstanding mutual benefits of DOE 
participation in INIS. In essence, it opens up previous research on the 
safe and peaceful uses of nuclear energy by making it freely and quickly 
available to scientists and engineers worldwide to help meet and solve 
today's energy and security challenges.

OSTI receives frequent requests for legacy nuclear energy-related 
documents, according to OSTI Director Walt Warnick. "There is a 
misperception that all science documents are readily accessible via the 
web. They are not. Much science remains hard to find and retrieve as it is 
recorded only in paper format. Thanks to the partnership between DOE and 
IAEA, this situation is changing, and the research for peaceful uses of 
nuclear energy is becoming more accessible online. This tremendous body of 
knowledge is thus enjoying a renaissance of use and interest, and science 
progress will accelerate."

Prior to the electronic era, where most documents are "born digital," OSTI 
provided research results in microfiche form to INIS and various depository 
libraries throughout the U.S. While OSTI and the DOE community have 
digitized a portion of these older reports in recent years, INIS has made 
major inroads in digitizing a significant volume. Reflecting the spirit of 
partnership, INIS provides electronic copies to the originating country for 
its own use in addition to providing access through its database at the 
IAEA in Vienna. Thus, the U.S. documents are being provided to OSTI for 
accessibility through the OSTI databases and Science.gov.

"Thanks to the collaborative work of the IAEA and its member states, 
scientists and students in the nuclear field now have instant access to 
important research and technical information over the internet," said IAEA 
Deputy Director General for Nuclear Energy Yury Sokolov.  "Our INIS 
programme continues to work to preserve and provide access to publications 
and documents on the peaceful applications of nuclear technology."

To date, nearly 50,000 U.S. technical reports have been digitized through 
this partnership-results stemming from billions of dollars of research and 
development-and posted on the DOE Information Bridge (www.osti.gov/bridge), 
which provides free public access to approximately 210,000 full-text 
documents. This progress, combined with the OSTI digitization efforts, 
represents about one-half of the documents slated for eventual web 
accessibility.

INIS was established to promote the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The 
INIS Database (http://inisdb2.iaea.org/) contains 3.1 million bibliographic 
records and 225,000 full-text documents and was opened to the public for 
free, unrestricted, online access in April 2009.

The DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information was established to 
make research accessible and useable so that science can more rapidly 
advance. To learn more about OSTI, visit www.osti.gov.