I have been meaning to explore and write about the E-print Network of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) of the US Department of Energy but I have been putting it off on the exceedingly incorrect assumption that the E-print Network would be of minor interest for medical librarians and a health-focused audience. How very wrong I was–there is a wealth of material useful for medical people and clinical researchers via the E-print Network and I urge those interested in medicine to explore it.

And it is not only medical librarians and clinicians who can benefit from perusal of the E-print Network but all those who want to understand the world of pre-prints, institutional repositories and federated searching should delve into this marvelous resource. Sol Lederman has provided a cogent, readable, invaluable series on the technical aspects of the E-print Network that also serves as introduction to many of these topics:

http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/home/entry/sophisticated_yet_simple_the_technology

http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/home/entry/sophisticated_yet_simple_the_technology1

http://www.osti.gov/ostiblog/home/entry/sophisticated_yet_simple_the_technology2

The E-print Network is powered behind the scenes by Deep Web Technologies which is also behind some of my favorite tools such as another remarkable, path breaking project WorldWideScience.org and the search engines Mednar and Biznar. That one firm, by powering one remarkable search engine after another, is doing more to facilitate the dissemination of scientific information worldwide than almost anyone else on the planet.

Here is a case in point of how the ability to access pre-prints in the E-print Network can fast track research. As I looked over the E-print Network site I noted that I could search by scientific society. That alone is a powerful feature — it is edifying simple to browse through lists of scientific societies and I certainly will refer to that list in my daily search for funding opportunities to list in ScanGrants. Many grants and scholarships are awarded by scientific societies and this list will prove an immensely helpful aid in scoping out the landscape of professional organizations in many fields.

You can also search by discipline (e.g., Biology and Medicine, Biotechnology, Chemistry). And under the rubric of each discipline, you can access an alphabetical list of scientists who have deposited papers in the collection as well as browse through and link out from a list of labs in the network and look them over and download even more material from their particular sites.

One slight criticism is that many biomedical labs and institutional repositories that contain medical-related material either have chosen not to join this network or do not realize that it would behoove them to do so vis-à-vis rendering their holdings findable. Perhaps money will be found under the pro healthcare-IT Obama administration for more aggressive outreach by OSTI to institutions that have institutional repositories that contain biomedicine-related material but who are not listed on the OSTI site, such as http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/dspace/index.jsp.

Perhaps the Director of the E-print Network, Dr. Dennis Traylor, will see this article and address this question. The E-print Network is a potentially huge boon for medical research and simply needs to become better known in the health sciences or its medical categories spun off into their own site. And if anybody can handle such a mammoth project, Deep Web Technologies can.

Here is an example of how researchers (and angel investors hoping to do well by doing good) can benefit from the current awareness tools in the E-print Network.

I decided to search for material on a subject I follow, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. I found an item from 2009,“A List of Household Objects for Robotic Retrieval Prioritized by People with ALS.”

Now this is the fascinating and important part. It says, “This technical report is designed to serve as a citable reference for the original prioritized object list that the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech released on its website in September of 2008. It is also expected to serve as the primary citable reference for the research associated with this list until the publication of a detailed, peer-reviewed paper.” Thus, robotics researchers who are engaged in the noble work of devising aids to assist those who are increasingly and devastatingly disabled by ALS can utilize the work of the authors of this paper from the Healthcare Robotics Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology without waiting for the often lumbering, interminable peer review publishing process to disgorge an article in a standard medical journal years hence.

The authors of the paper state, “We intend for this list to be used by researchers to inform the design and benchmarking of robotic systems, especially research related to autonomous mobile manipulation.” They also provide in the paper a link to the list of objects discussed in their paper and make the important point that, “…robotics researchers working on robot manipulation have yet to define common benchmarks by which they can evaluate performance in comparable ways.” They also report, interestingly, “…Two patients also mentioned “myself ” as an additional object, which represents the desire of some patients to have a robot capable of repositioning their bodies. Robots that can grasp and change the position of body parts (legs and arms) or the whole body would be extremely useful for this patient group.”

This example demonstrates the vast potential of the E-print Network for facilitating scientific and technological advancement. In this case, specialists in robotics, physical rehabilitation, occupational therapy, biomedical engineering, biomechanics, neuroscience and neurology among other fields plus intrigued mechanical engineers and venture capitalists could dive into developing technologies that would be of immediate assistance to those with ALS and similar disabilities. What could be more important than a search tool that endows the wider research community with practical tools and resources of immediate use?

And with the increase in the number of institutional repositories and ever increasing production of gray literature and Deep Web resources search engines like the E-print Network will become ever more important. There are important developments out there. Not everything in an institutional archive is a matter of historical interest only. Some of it can be capitalized on commercially and for the betterment of humanity in the here and now. On that score, the E-Print Network offers alerts on new items of interest in a user’s field.

On the whole, the E-Print Network is a model of the best of the Open Access, Science 2.0 and Research 2.0 movements and is also a user-friendly way for young people curious about the many fields of science to explore its many aspects by just scrolling through the lists of scientific societies or downloading scientific papers to see how they are constructed and the writing styles used therein.

This is a case where tax money has been used wisely and well.

(Deep Web Technologies is an AltSearchEngines sponsor.)