From the DOE/OSTI Web Site:
Researchers funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) can now make their scientific research data easier to cite and easier to find from worldwide sources. The DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is now registering publicly available scientific research datasets created by DOE-funded researchers through DataCite. OSTI, within the Office of Science, became a member of DataCite in January 2011 to facilitate access to DOE datasets. Through this membership, OSTI assigns permanent identifiers, known as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), to the individual datasets to aid in citation, discovery, and retrieval. Creating stable pathways to these datasets makes the scientific process more accessible and the research more replicable for future discoveries.
In August, OSTI minted the first DOI for a DOE dataset through DataCite. The dataset is from the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility. ARM is a multi-laboratory, user facility created to advance scientific knowledge in a wide range of interdisciplinary earth sciences. ARM is set to register approximately 700 datasets with OSTI in the initial implementation. This “DOIs for datasets” service helps enable achievement of the DOE goal to provide open access to experimental data, as set forth in the DOE 2011 Strategic Plan.
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The scientific research datasets with their DOIs assigned are then announced by OSTI with other R&D results in searchable databases such as the Energy Citations Database (www.osti.gov/energycitations). Subsequently these often hard-to-find datasets are included in Science Accelerator (www.scienceaccelerator.gov), Science.gov (www.science.gov), and WorldWideScience.org (www.worldwidescience.org). As research datasets gain increased visibility and are cited by researchers and academia, important building blocks for discovery are set in place.
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