The following will be of interest for those of you working to meet the information needs of physical scientists. Dan E-PhySCI News Physical Sciences Information Update January 2001 Issue 2001:1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- U.S.Department of Energy Editor, Lynn Davis [log in to unmask] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- E-PhySCI News keeps you informed about rapidly evolving developments related to information in the Physical Sciences. It is issued quarterly by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information. If you have an article to include or suggested topics for future issues, send e-mail to Lynn Davis, Editor, at [log in to unmask] E-PhySCI News is archived at http://www.osti.gov/ephyscinews. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- In this issue: 1. News & Information 60,000 DOE Scientific and Technical Reports Online E-Government Initiative for DOE Technical Reports Physical Sciences Information Infrastructure 2. Featured Sites PrePRINT Network Alert Service 3. Scientist Updates 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry 4. Upcoming Meetings ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- 1. News & Information 60,000 DOE Scientific and Technical Reports Online For the first time ever, each of 60,000 full-text scientific and technical reports sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE) is directly accessible on the Internet using a unique URL. These reports reside on the DOE Information Bridge at http://www.osti.gov/bridge which provides to the public at no charge the capability to search every word of all the reports. A Persistent URL (PURL) allows educators, students, scientists, and engineers to directly access individual documents and to easily direct others to them. The collection of over 5 million full-text pages is DOE's report literature output since January 1995. Scientists and researchers are encouraged to share these reports with colleagues and others. This ever-increasing report collection is the product of an extensive collaboration among DOE Programs, Operations Offices, Laboratories, and other DOE contractors. It is made available to the public through a partnership between the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information and the Government Printing Office. For more information, please contact Kathy Chambers, Product Manager, at (865) 576-0487 or via e-mail at [log in to unmask] E-Government Initiative for DOE Technical Reports The Department of Energy (DOE) has established a new performance goal for Operations Offices and Laboratories to complete the transition to a fully-electronic process for submitting, retaining, and making the Department’s scientific and technical information (STI) readily available to its broad constituency of users. In a memorandum signed by program officials, a call was issued to all offices and laboratories to provide all full-text STI reports and accompanying announcement data to the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in electronic formats by January 1, 2001. Many offices and labs in DOE were already providing reports and data electronically. OSTI and the Department’s STI community initiated this massive effort in 1998 by reinventing information processing, management, and delivery systems and procedures to allow for the transition. The transition has allowed OSTI to make full-text reports available and searchable, with a minimal processing effort, through a set of tools that create an electronic environment throughout the information life cycle. OSTI makes the publicly releasable full-text STI reports searchable on the DOE Information Bridge, accessible by the public at http://www.osti.gov/bridge. As a result, DOE continues to lead all other Federal agencies in the electronic receipt, processing and delivery of full-text STI generated by scientists, engineers, and researchers. For more information about this initiative, please contact Sharon Jordan at (865) 576-1194 or via e-mail at [log in to unmask] Physical Sciences Information Infrastructure For more than 50 years, studies have called for a comprehensive resource for finding, understanding, and using information about our physical world. Realizing that the Internet and distributed information technologies now provide the means to fulfill this vision, the Department of Energy sponsored a workshop May 30-31, 2000, at the National Academy of Sciences, to explore the concept of a future Physical Sciences Information Infrastructure (PSII). Workshop panelists agreed "The time is now; the need is now." The Workshop report http://www.osti.gov/physicalsciences endorses PSII as an integrated network of dispersed resources, a point of convergence for tools and technologies, and an openly available source of information in sciences that explore the nature and properties of energy and nonliving matter. The Report also emphasizes the need for a collaborative effort involving science agencies, academia, professional societies, and the private sector. The DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), with over 50 years experience and leadership in the collection and sharing of worldwide scientific and technical information, has laid the foundation for the PSII with innovative information products and services. Currently, OSTI is actively pursuing the collaborative development of an implementation strategy for PSII through partnerships and consortia agreements. Partnership arrangements, sources of content, tools/technologies, and numerous other planning activities for the PSII are currently being explored as support for this initiative continues to grow. For more information, contact RL Scott at [log in to unmask] or (865) 576-1193. 2. Featured Sites PrePRINT Network Alert Service Enlist the latest technology and keep up with preprints in your scientific discipline! PrePRINT Alerts is a new personalized alert service for the PrePRINT Network http://www.osti.gov/preprint/. This is the first alert service that harvests information from the Deep Web, whereby the underlying content of multiple databases is searched rather than only surface pages. The PrePRINT Network offers a single-query portal to 340,000 preprints on 1,500 preprint servers in disciplines related to Department Of Energy (DOE) research. PrePRINT Alerts allows patrons of the Preprint Network to register, create one or more personalized search profiles, and automatically receive notifications of new preprint information fitting the profile. As new servers are added to the Network, or as researchers add new preprints to servers already on the Network, PrePRINT Alerts sends an e-mail message calling your attention to all the new material that meets your profile. To register your search profile, follow the instructions linked to the PrePRINT Network home page. To accomplish its novel search capability, PrePRINT Alerts applies the Explorer Distributed Query Engine, developed in collaboration with the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) by Innovative Web Applications (IWA) http://www.iwapps.com. IWA, a small business in Los Alamos, New Mexico, developed the software, which currently supports several OSTI Web-based applications. 3. Scientist Updates 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Alan G. MacDiarmid won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in the area of conductive polymers. Through an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy, he conducted research that was primarily directed towards the evaluation of polyacetylene, the prototype conducting polymer, as an electrode-active material in novel, rechargeable batteries employing non-aqueous electrolytes. This research was done at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Chemistry during the 1980's. The resulting plastic batteries are the most radical innovation in commercial batteries since the dry cell was introduced in 1890. They offer higher capacity, higher voltage, and longer shelf-life than many competitive designs. More information about Alan MacDiarmid and his research is available at http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/macdiarmid.html. 4. Upcoming Meetings Meetings of interest in the Physical Sciences: 2001 TMS (The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society) Annual Meeting and Exhibition February 11-15, 2001 - New Orleans, Louisiana http://www.tms.org/Meetings/Annual-01/AnnMtg01Home.html AAAS 2001 Annual Meeting and Science Innovation Exposition February 15-20, 2001 - San Francisco, CA http://www.aaas.org/meetings/2001/index.htm 4th Industrial Energy Efficiency Symposium and Exposition February 19 - 22, 2001 - Washington, DC http://www.oitexpo4.com/ 2001 Layered Ocean Model Users' Workshop February 26-28, 2001 - Miami, FL http://panoramix.rsmas.miami.edu/micom/wrkshp-01.html Symposium on the Application of Geophysics to Engineering and Environmental Problems March 4-7, 2001 - Denver, CO http://www.sageep.com/ Corrosion/NACExpo 2001 March 11-16, 2001 - Houston, TX http://nace.org/NACE/Content/Conferences/C2001/Corrosion2001index.asp Building Energy 2001 Conference March 22 - 24, 2001 - Boston, MA http://www.nesea.org/buildings/be2000.html 221st ACS National Meeting April 1- 5, 2001 - San Diego, CA http://www.acs.org/meetings/calendar/calendr1.html#2001 Oceanology International 2001 Conference April 3 - 5, 2001 - Miami Beach, FL http://www.oiamericas.com/ MRS (Materials Research Society) Spring Meeting April 16-20, 2001 - San Francisco, CA http://www.mrs.org/meetings/spring2001/cfp/ National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) Users' Meeting May 21-24, 2001 - Upton, NY http://nslsweb.nsls.bnl.gov/nsls/users/meeting/ Society for Scholarly Publishing 23rd Annual Meeting June 6-8, 2001 - Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco, CA http://www.sspnet.org/ 22nd International Conference on Photonic, Electronic and Atomic Collisions (ICPEAC) July 18-24, 2001 Santa Fe, New Mexico http://icpeac2001.phy.ornl.gov/home.html If you would like to subscribe, provide a change of address, or unsubscribe, please send e-mail to Lynn Davis, Editor, at [log in to unmask] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Product of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information www.osti.gov