Science.gov delivers

Science.gov

Explorers of Science.gov, which provides access to more than 47 million pages of government science information from astrophysics to zoology, can now get personalized e-mail alerts of their science interests.

Subscribers can register with the site by providing an e-mail address. They would then type in search terms for the topic of interest, label it and select the databases to be searched. The site will send up-to-date documents and other information -- up to 25 relevant results -- from each of the selected sources every Monday to the subscriber’s e-mail account.

Subscribers can create several searches collected in a personalized Alert Archive, which stores six weeks of results so past activity can be reviewed. It is the third such upgrade to the site, which is hosted by the Energy Department’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

The site was originally launched in December 2002, providing the public a unified search capability of the government’s science databases for the first time. Content includes scientific and technical data, publications, databases, documentation, and other resources, and experts to contact. Version 2.0 was launched May 2004 and introduced relevant ranking of returned searches.

The site allows searches across 30 databases and more than 1,700 Web sites. Seventeen scientific and technical organizations from a dozen federal departments and agencies contribute to Science.gov.