Re: NIH Public Access Mandate Passes Senate & Govt Repositories

["Ann Okerson" <aokerson@gmail.com>]

Bonnie, these days most grant proposals are submitted via online 
forms or at least by e-mail, as are most interim and final 
reports, which funding agencies require from grantees, either 6 
or 12 month intervals and also upon completion.  It's hard to 
understand why at least some appropriate parts of these could not 
be made available in a useful form.  To be sure, it would take 
some investment on the part of each granting agency (such as Web 
site, organizing, formatting/light editing work -- but most of 
them probably already have Web sites?).

Having such publicly available reports would serve several good 
purposes:  (1) demonstrating grantee accountability; (2) 
identifying *all* grants and describing progress, whether 
findings are published in peer review journals or not (it may be 
that research findings from agencies such as NSF and NIH are 
generally published, but in various other fields that's not the 
case (humanities, social sciences, for example) and it is very 
hard to find out who's doing what -- try it sometime; and (3) 
ready availability of reports to the public would clearly show 
where publishers add value (or not) (see also Anthony Watkinson's 
comments about poorly written reports) and will enable libraries 
to make better informed choices about whether or not to buy the 
value-added materials.

Ann Okerson/Yale Library

On 10/29/07, Klein, Bonnie CIV DTIC O <BKlein@dtic.mil> wrote:
> 1) Re: Ann's note.  You are correct that often the documented
> results of government funded research winds up in filing
> cabinets, doomed as gray literature and to extinction.  However,
> some government agencies do have the infrastructure and do
> support public websites where they make available reports
> resulting from contracts or grants.  These repositories, however,
> face the same issues of repositories everywhere -- getting the
> producing and sponsoring organizations to contribute their
> documents.
>
> An example of a government repository is DoD's Defense Technical
> Information Center(DTIC).  Searching the Technical Reports
> database http://stinet.dtic.mil/str/guided-tr.html for Corporate
> Author "Yale" matched 2134 out of 981113 citations.  Of those,
> 418 are full-text.  The latest accession is ADA471819 (Full Text
> Handle http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/ADA471819 )  Title: A Fast
> Randomized Algorithm for the Approximation of Matrices Corporate
> Author: YALE UNIV NEW HAVEN CT DEPT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE Report
> Date: 31 JUL 2007.  If you do a Google search of the document
> title, Yale's copy is the first hit and DTIC is second.  Also see
> DOE's GrayLit Network:  http://www.osti.gov/graylit/ and
> www.science.gov .

[SNIP]

> Bonnie Klein
> Technical Reports Team
> Defense Technical Information Center