Decades of nuclear research supported by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and its predecessor agencies are being made searchable on the World Wide Web, as part of a collaborative effort between the DOE and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The project aims to give researchers, academics, and the general public access to vast volumes of valuable nuclear-related research over the internet. As part of its knowledge preservation mandate, the IAEA′s International Nuclear Information System(INIS) works to preserve nuclear knowledge by digitizing historic nuclear energy research documents dating from 1970 through the early 1990s. Collections from over 29 countries are now digitally available and several additional digital preservation projects are ongoing or are being established, particularly in the Latin America and Caribbean regions. "Thanks to the collaborative work of the IAEA and its Member States, scientists and students in the nuclear field now have instant access to important research and technical information over the internet," said IAEA Deputy Director General for Nuclear Energy Yury Sokolov. "Our INIS programme continues to work to preserve and provide access to publications and documents on the peaceful applications of nuclear technology." The DOE project is one of the larger programmes in the INIS project, and includes more than 180,000 documents from the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). OSTI is the U.S. representative to INIS and has had its own digitization focus in recent years. The novel partnership highlights the longstanding mutual benefits of DOE participation in INIS. In essence, it opens up previous research on the safe and peaceful uses of nuclear energy by making it freely and quickly available to scientists and engineers. By making scientific data electronically available, the INIS database helps scientists and students to attain volumes of data that are otherwise inaccessible. "There is a misperception that all science documents are readily accessible via the web," said OSTI Director Walt Warnick. "They are not. Much science remains hard to find and retrieve as it is recorded only in paper format. But thanks to the partnership between the DOE and the IAEA, this situation is changing, and the research for peaceful uses of nuclear energy is becoming more accessible online. This tremendous body of knowledge is thus enjoying a renaissance of use and interest, and science progress will accelerate." To date, over 50,000 U.S. technical reports have been digitized through the INIS-OSTI partnership - results stemming from billions of dollars of research and development - and posted on the DOE Information Bridge website. This progress, combined with the OSTI digitization effort, represents about one-half of the documents slated for eventual web accessibility. About INIS INIS was established to promote the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The INIS Database contains 3.1 million bibliographic records and 225,000 full-text documents and was opened to the public for free, unrestricted, online access in April 2009. About OSTI The DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information was established to make research accessible and useable so that science can more rapidly advance. To learn more about OSTI, visit http://www.osti.gov.