Engaging New Partners in Transportation Research: Integrating Publishing, Archiving, and Indexing of Technical Literature into the Research Process

摘要

Over the past several decades a variety of federal and state programs have invested intransportation research. The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) annuallyinvests approximately $180 million in State Planning and Research (SPR) and UniversityTransportation Centers (UTC). This investment generates an extensive portfolio of “greyliterature” that is not yet uniformly cataloged or accessible, despite the best efforts of theNational Technical Information Service, the Transportation Research Board, and the NationalTransportation Library. This paper reports on a review of publishing and archiving practices fortransportation research technical reports, summarizes best practices, and recommends that UTCand SPR research programs seek and strengthen partnerships with libraries to facilitate improvedproduction, stewardship and dissemination of research reports.This paper describes an open access program in Indiana that has digitally archived approximately1,500 SPR reports dating to 1956, implemented consistent name authority, and created digitalobject identifiers (DOIs) for reports and data sets to systematically integrate technical reportsinto scholarly literature. Through new partnerships between the researchers and the homeinstitution, researchers have developed processes to leverage technical report production with theuniversity press to ensure agile adaptation to emerging digital publishing and open access trends.It is suggested the adoption of the techniques and partnership herein described will result in moreefficient investment of state and national transportation research funds by further reducingresearch duplication and by demonstrating improved stewardship of research dollars.