Towards a New Search Engine for Government Studies and Reports

[Adam Sobieski]

U.S. Open Government,

Hello. I am a proponent of open science. Publicly funded scholarship and scientific research and development should be available to the public. Full documents, e.g., PDFs, should be available from contemporary search engines, e.g., Google Scholar, from projects funded in part or entirely by our tax dollars.

From open science to open government (and open policy), let us envision a new search engine for studies and reports funded by governments in the United States. Government studies and reports are important documents, informing legislatures and policymakers about governments' operations, evaluating programs, presenting research findings, and making policy recommendations.

Today, in addition to Data.gov initiatives, there is the National Technical Report Library (NTRL, https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/) run by the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) of the Chamber of Commerce. The NTIS acquires, indexes, abstracts, and archives the largest collection of U.S. government-sponsored technical reports in existence while the NTRL offers access to these authenticated government technical reports to libraries and technical information users.

There is also USA Spending (https://www.usaspending.gov/) where interested citizens can search through federal government contracts, e.g., basic research, advanced research, development, and special studies/analysis that are not R&D, these kinds of contracts amongst those expected to produce government studies and reports.

A new search engine for government studies and reports would:

1. help public-sector personnel to determine whether existing studies or reports suited their needs before seeking the creation of new ones,
2. help the authors of studies and reports to discover previous works,
3. help the public to observe their tax dollars at work,
4. help make possible scientific studies into these documents.

Thank you.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski