“The OSG provides common service and support for resource providers and scientific institutions using a distributed fabric of high throughput computational services. The OSG does not own resources but provides software and services to users and resource providers alike to enable the opportunistic usage and sharing of resources. The OSG is jointly funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. here for a two-page printable overview of OSG….”
Category Archives: oa.doe
DOE Data Explorer
“The DOE Data Explorer (DDE) is an information tool to help you locate DOE’s collections of scientific research data and also retrieve individual datasets submitted by data centers, repositories, and other organizations within the Department. The DDE database includes collection citations prepared by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, as well as citations for the individual, submitted datasets.
All of the collections and all of the individual datasets result from research and development funded in whole or in part by the Department of Energy. Some reflect combined funding – DOE’s combined with that from other agencies or the private sector…”
DOE Announces $11 Million for Seven New Projects to Test New Options for Optimal Efficiency of the U.S. Electric Grid | Department of Energy
“The Energy Department’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) today announced $11 million in funding for seven transformational projects that will develop realistic, open-access models and data repositories to aid in improving the U.S. electric grid….”
Details of Energy Dept. Plan to Ease Access to Research Don’t Please All – Publishing – The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Last week, without much hoopla, the Department of Energy announced it had a plan for how to increase public access to the results of research it pays for. Unless you’re a grantee who might be directly affected, or a publisher, librarian, or open-access advocate whose job requires you to keep tabs on such developments, you probably missed the news altogether.
But the announcement marks a new, pragmatic phase in the struggle between competing philosophies of how widely published research should be shared, and how quickly. And the policy makes its debut just as publishers and library and university groups are testing new mechanisms of their own to help research move more efficiently in a networked environment. Over the next year, how these pieces of scholarly-communication machinery mesh—or clash—should become a lot more clear….”
Peter Suber, The open-access policy from the Department of Energy.
“The US Department of Energy (DOE) released its open-access policy today, after it was approved by the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB)….My own take: We’ll soon have more OA than we had before, and that’s good. Another major federal research-funding agency now has an OA policy, and that’s good. I could go on about why these are good, and in a longer piece I would. But the policy has three significant weaknesses, and it’s the first in a series of about two dozen federal-agency OA policies required by the Obama administration. Here I want to focus on the weaknesses in order to do what I can to head off similar weaknesses from other agencies.
1. The policy relies heavily on publisher web sites, when it should have relied on sites independent of publishers.
The purpose of the White House OA directive was to assure public access to publicly-funded research. Reliance on publisher web sites runs counter to that purpose. Many publishers lobbied aggressively and deceptively against the type of policy that the White House has required agencies to adopt. The only way to insure the cooperation of publishers is through regulation, and I strongly oppose the regulation of publishers. So do publishers and the White House, of course. (Aside, part of the genius of green OA mandates from funding agencies is that they regulate grantees, not publishers.) However, once we rule out the regulation of publishers, and depend on publishers to provide OA, we should not be surprised if publishers deliver late, temporary, or selective OA.
The worst part of CHORUS is the recommendation to rely on publisher web sites, the worst aspect of the DOE policy is its concession to that recommendation, and the worst part of today’s news is the White House approval of the DOE concession.
2. DOE seems to think it will avoid the first problem linking to OA copies of relevant articles in the institutional repositories of DOE-funded authors. But DOE doesn’t require DOE-funded authors to deposit in their institutional repositories. Hence, this is smoke and mirrors. It’s another reason to think that the DOE is not serious about assured OA, and is content with late, temporary, or selective OA.
Just as the chief fault of the gold-leaning OA policy from the RCUK was fixed by the green OA mandate adopted by HEFCE, DOE could fix the chief problem in its current policy simply by requiring DOE-funded authors to deposit in their institutional repositories. (For those without IRs, DOE could require deposit in some designated universal or residual repository like Zenodo.) This step would provide OA to all DOE-funded research, and provide it from sites independent of publishers.
3. The policy offers no reuse rights beyond fair use. This is a substantive problem because fair use doesn’t suffice for the purposes of research. For example, it doesn’t suffice for text mining or translation. But the lack of reuse rights is also a problem for important procedural reasons. The DOE policy is supposed to conform to guidelines laid down by the White House in February 2013. Those guidelines called for agency policies to “maximize the potential for…creative reuse.” Nobody anywhere believes that fair use maximizes the potential for creative reuse. Fair use doesn’t even increase the potential for creative reuse. We already have fair-use rights for all copyrighted works in the US, and to increase the potential for creative reuse we’d have to go further. “Maximize” is a strong word. Creative reuse requires open licenses, and maximizing the potential for creative reuse requires minimally restrictive open licenses, such as CC-BY for texts and CC0 for data. The real problem here is that the White House abandoned its own guidelines. After calling for strong reuse rights, it approved a policy that does nothing to increase reuse rights beyond what we already have….”
SPARC responds to the Department of Energy’s Public Access Plan | SPARC
“The [Obama] Administration has made open access a priority, and that is a huge step forward. The Department of Energy’s plan is the first opportunity we have to see how the Administration will deliver on this vision – and there are clearly mixed results. The DOE’s plan takes steps towards achieving the goals of the Directive, but falls short in some key areas. Most critically, the DOE plan does not adequately address the reuse rights that are necessary for the public to do more than simply access and read individual articles. Without clearly articulating these reuse rights, the public’s ability to download, analyze, text mine, data mine, and perform computational analysis on these articles is severely limited, and a crucial principle of the White House Directive cannot be fully realized….The DOE plan is a mixed bag in terms of ease of access….[W]e are concerned that the plan places too strong an emphasis on defaulting to versions of articles residing on publishers’ websites, where terms and conditions of use may be restricted. SPARC encourages DOE to ensure that articles are deposited into repositories immediately upon publication and are made available via channels where their reuse can be fully leveraged….“
Statement on Digital Data Management | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)
“The Office of Science mission is to deliver the scientific discoveries and major scientific tools that transform our understanding of nature and advance the energy, economic, and national security of the United States. The Office of Science Statement on Digital Data Management has been developed with input from a variety of stakeholders in this mission1.
Here, data management involves all stages of the digital data life cycle including capture, analysis, sharing, and preservation. The focus of this statement is sharing and preservation of digital research data …”