News.com has a story about the Department of Energy closing down PubScience, a research database with about 2 million documents. Some private companies complained successfully that there was some overlap of published documents, which the companies sell, since federal law prohibits the government from competing with private interests. At the opening of PubScience in 1999, the U. S. Secretary of Energy at the time, Bill Richardson said, "For science to rapidly advance at the frontiers, it must be open. And shared knowledge is the enabler of scientific progress."

However, since the DOE funds almost all the research, and publishers of documents can choose whether to make them available on PubScience, it seems odd that these companies are defining what is available by the DOE.

Note, when I tried a search on PubScience, I was able to find many documents, but in all the searches I did, only DOE publications came up. There were no documents published by other entities. It seems like these may have been removed, without shutting down the seach part of the site entirely.