With the United States federal government spending over $130 billion annually for research and development, ways to increase the productivity of that research can have a significant return on investment. It is well known that all scientific advancement is based on work that has come before. Isaac Newton expressed this thought most eloquently in 1676, when he wrote, "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
The process by which science knowledge is spread is called diffusion. It is therefore important to better understand and measure the benefits of this diffusion of knowledge. In particular, it is important to understand whether advances in Internet searching – such as simultaneous, ranked searching of distributed digital collections made broadly available via the Internet – can speed up the diffusion of scientific knowledge and accelerate scientific progress. Near-term opportunities continue to emerge to further speed up knowledge diffusion. To help craft a strategy for converting opportunities to reality, research is needed on the impact such speeding up of knowledge diffusion has on the advancement of science.
This article discusses these issues and describes research being conducted by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) under its strategic initiative, Innovations in Scientific Knowledge and Advancement (ISKA).
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
