November 12, 2014

NTIS Expands Free Access to Federal Technical Reports

The National Technical Reports Library (NTRL) is now offering the American public free public access to a searchable online database of approximately three million federal science and technology reports.

The library is a service of the U.S. Commerce Department's National Technical Information Service.

The full text for 800,000 of these documents can be downloaded immediately in electronic PDF format without charge. The remaining NTRL reports, most published before 1995, must be scanned from microfiche archival files before being provided either as electronic PDF's or in print for a fee. However, each time a microfiche document is scanned to fulfill such a request, the agency will add the electronic full-text PDF to its online database for subsequent free public download.

Details at: NTIS.gov

See: NTRL Public

As one of the world's largest repositories of U.S. Government-sponsored research results, the new National Technical Reports Library (NTRL Public) offers fast and easy access to more than 2.2 million titles, with links to over 700,000 corresponding digitized full-text technical reports.

Documents in the NTIS Technical Reports collection are the results of federally funded research. They are directly submitted to or collected by NTIS from Federal agencies for permanent accessibility to industry, academia and the public.  Before purchasing from NTIS, you may want to check for free access from (1) the issuing organization's website; (2) the U.S. Government Printing Office's Federal Digital System website http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys; (3) the federal government Internet portal USA.gov; or (4) a web search conducted using a commercial search engine such as http://www.google.com.