The Federal government invests upwards of $16 billion each year on basic research, and much more on applied research and development (R&D). The Department of Energy is one of the Agencies that sponsors such R&D.

The key deliverable coming out of these efforts is scientific and technical information (STI). Because this information has value if and only if someone uses it, disseminating that information to users is a necessary function. Within DOE, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information has the primary responsibility for collecting, organizing, preserving, and disseminating that information.

NTIS and the Department of Energy (DOE) have worked closely together for several decades to disseminate information coming from the DOE R&D program. NTIS makes paper reports and microfiche of DOE STI available to the public for a fee. It also disseminates DOE bibliographic STI to secondary publishers.

DOE is among the Agencies which are forging ahead in the application of new technologies for the dissemination of scientific and technical information. While the nature of the relationship between DOE and NTIS has indeed changed as a consequence of our new electronic systems, NTIS remains critical to the dissemination of much of the scientific and technical information (STI) DOE has created.

The problem that NTIS faces is a consequence of two competing requirements. First, it has no appropriation from Congress and, therefore, it is required to generate revenue from document sales. This mode of operation has always been problematical, as the fees charged for documents tends to discourage the very dissemination that the Nation needs. Now, the new electronic ways of doing business make generating revenue more difficult. Such difficulty was exacerbated in 1999 when a second requirement was imposed upon NTIS: NTIS is not to charge the consumer for government information delivered via the Internet.

Thus, NTIS was required to treat dissemination by paper and microfiche much differently than dissemination by the Internet. NTIS could generate revenue with paper and microfiche, but could not generate revenue via Internet delivery. The Information Age revolution has diminished the demand for paper and microfiche reports. As paper and microfiche are being supplanted by the Internet, NTIS' situation thus became very difficult. Ultimately, if relief is not forthcoming, the situation for NTIS is hopeless.

A realignment of dissemination responsibilities back to the Agencies that create the STI has been proposed. Such proposals should explicilty address the key services that NTIS continues to provide. For example, the need to supply paper copies of documents in response to individual customer requests will continue as long as there are customers who do not have ready, high speed access to the Internet and high capacity printing equipment, and until legacy reports are digitized. Producing such paper reports may be a conceptually straight forward task, but the huge volumes of materials involved make such dissemination a daunting proposition. Few government Agencies now have the capability to fully disseminate their legacy STI--certainly not without significant appropriation, and Agencies like DOE are ill-prepared to pick up this responsibility.

So, what is the remedy? Some have suggested reassigning NTIS functions to another Agency. All such remedies have one thing in common: they require an appropriation from Congress. Such remedies are viable only because they implicitly rescind a major groud rule under which NTIS is required to operate. While NTIS has been denied an appropriation from Congress, its successor must surely receive such an appropriation--a striking logical inconsistency. Those who advocate such remedies should ask themselves what has been gained by a) eliminating an Agency that can't quite sustain itself on sales revenues while b) replacing it with another Agency that has no prospect of sustaining the activity on a cost recovery basis.

It has been suggested that LOC take over the responsibilities of NTIS. Disseminating large volumes of paper reports is a function quite different than the roles traditionally performed by LOC. It currently handles very few STI documents produced by the Executive Agencies, and it is not known for public dissemination of reports in paper format, the only format in which a vast amount of legacy STI resides.

Before offering up another type of remedy, let's reexamine the mission of NTIS. At root, the information dissemination function that NTIS performs amounts to a library function.

As every community in the country knows, libraries simply cannot sustain themselves. Everyone seems to agree that information dissemination is necessary, but those who expect a library to be self-sustaining expect that which has never been nor never will be. As there is no alternative, the funding of libraries is a legitimate and necessary government function. With respect to Federal R&D, this informtion dissemination function is essential if the taxpayer is to get full benefit from the mult-billion dollar R&D investment.

The Government Printing Office (GPO), which is a part of the Legislative Branch of government, has a mandate to provide access to Federal information. DOE enjoys a very close relationship with GPO. In the last few years we have pioneered new kinds of partnerships with GPO. Our new relationship has been singled out by the Chairman of the Joint Committee on Printing as a model for other Agencies to emulate. As much as the Nation has benefitted from the wonderful relationship DOE has with GPO, the simple fact is that relationship could not exist if either GPO or DOE did not receive an appropriation from Congress.

Thus, I conclude that NTIS performs a necessary function, but that function can only be sustained, either by NTIS or another organization, if there is an appropriation from Congress.

The IT revolution we are living through is far from over; it has only just begun. More changes should be expected. As the structure of government reacts to these changes, let's resolve that service to the public be improved, not compromised. Whatever remedy is adopted for the NTIS problem, it would indeed be tragic if a consequence of this exciting revolution were a decline in an essential public information service.