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.
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