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://stin
et.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/gray
lit/ and
> www.science.gov .
[SNIP]
> Bonnie Klein
> Technical Reports Team
> Defense Technical Information Center
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