Building an Effective Environmental Management Science Program: Initial Assessment (1996)

For the EMSP to contribute to the long-term cleanup mission, effective mechanisms must be found to transfer the results of the research to the “users”—technologists in government, industry, and academia who can utilize this knowledge to develop new or improved cleanup methods. An important component of this transfer process is the open publication of research results using the traditional venues of national and international scientific meetings and peer-reviewed journals. These conventional publication outlets work well for communication of research results within the scientific community, but they may work less well for reaching those involved in technology development. In its future reports, the committee will consider the potential benefits of more dedicated dissemination activities—for example, workshops that bring together researchers and the users of research, and special DOE or independent publications to announce research results that can be developed and implemented rapidly to give valuable near-term technology payoffs. The committee will pay close attention to the balance between the costs and benefits of these special dissemination activities, given the budget and human resource limitations for the EMSP.

The committee's statement of task directed it to address the question of how the EMSP could take advantage of research efforts and capabilities in other DOE programs and other federal agencies. The committee offers some preliminary comments directed to this issue in this section.

The EMSP was created very quickly by DOE in response to congressional mandate, and it is the committee's impression that the program was established without much planning for coordination with existing ER programs—such as the “core” research programs in basic energy sciences or cross-cutting research programs such as the Natural and Accelerated In-Situ Bioremediation (NABIR) program (DOE, 1995d). These ER programs are vital to the department's long-term mission and are an important part of the nation 's basic research portfolio. The committee believes that it will be important for DOE to establish a focus for the EMSP that builds on —but does not duplicate or divert funding from—these existing ER programs in order to improve the usefulness of the research to the long-term cleanup mission.