Talk:United States Department of Energy National Laboratories

Copyrights
It seems to be the case (and the laboratories seem to think so) that things produced by these labs (at least, by Brookhaven, I'm not sure about the others) are not work of the United States government and hence not necessarily public domain. This is a common belief amonf Wikipedia contributors, though, so it would be nice to obtain an authoritative answer and post it here (in the article). --Andrew 16:01, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)
 * At least for Sandia National Laboratories, much of the content of its websites and reports is copyright Sandia Corporation, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed-Martin Corporation. Now, as for other labs, they may handle things differently, but with Sandia, you have to check the copyright tag for pretty much everything to figure out if it's a DOE publication (and thus would be public domain) or a Sandia publication (and thus probably wouldn't be).  --ABQCat 21:50, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

In my understanding of it, intellectual property in general for work done at the labs was historically assigned to the operating agency (DOE), not the contractor (i.e. Sandia or UC). This was because of fears of the government losing control over things it had funded. I am not sure if this changed with Bayh-Dole (1980), though, which might have switched it around (though it only applied to patents, I believe). Brookhaven's website seems to imply that its content is considered a work of the Federal Government for security purposes. I am having trouble finding any notices on their copyright policy. --Fastfission 22:43, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I went through this with Brookhaven; their image permissions are restrictive, and User:Aarchiba/Brookhaven permission documents an email exchange I had with them. If they are also claiming that it's a work of the Federal Government, that's pretty dubious.

Of course, it's quite possible they haven't asked anyone who knows what they're talking about to review the boilerplate on their site. --Andrew 20:58, Apr 27, 2005 (UTC)


 * I suspect the latter -- most places aren't as copyright conscious as they ought to be, and I've found that a lot of places are willing to try and claim copyright on things which I'm fairly sure they are not allowed to. But there's no good way to question that, as it stands (if "fair use" was a right rather than a defense then one could, but as it is now it is not the case). --Fastfission 23:05, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * I sent them an official-looking e-mail to ask for a clarification of these policies, will let you know what sort of response I get, if any. (I find when I e-mail places asking for how their copyright policy correlates with the current state of copyright law, I get no response, and I suspect they forward it on to a legion of lawyer who promptly put me in a database as a potential troublemaker, but such is life. I have a fancy-enough looking title that I usually can get taken mostly seriously, whether that is to my benefit or detriment in such issues, I'm not sure). --Fastfission 00:31, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I've always heard DOE research done at Argonne, except for classified research, is public domain... I'll ask Argonne lawyers to find out what Argonne's stand on this, and post their response here. 7 August, 2005.


 * I talked with some Brookhaven lawyers a few months back and they told me that the copyright status of individual agencies (i.e. national labs) varies from contract to contract. It would be nice if we had a good list of which ones did and did not have the ability to claim copyright, but I don't know of any easy way to get that without sending out a ton of e-mails. --Fastfission 14:26, 7 August 2005 (UTC)


 * The copyright situation greatly depends the origin of the funds. If the funds are 100% from a federal agency, then they are treated one way. If it is a WFO situation, even 1%, it is treated another way. 69.251.189.247 (talk) 06:45, 19 November 2008 (UTC) urmomma

Argonne West?
What's the situation with the link here for Argonne National Laboratory (West)? The template at the bottom doesn't mention it, and neither does the Argonne National Laboratory page nor the doe.gov site linked to - which seems to suggest that Argonne is all on the one site. Is it a secondary site belonging to Argonne, or another lab on the same site, or...? Shimgray 21:43, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * I don't know anything about it, or whether it should be counted as a separate lab, but I did find this official-looking page on it: http://www.anlw.anl.gov/anlw_history/main.html . It looks like it was the beginning of what later became INEEL. "ANLW is now part of the Idaho National Laboratory. Please replace bookmarks or links with http://www.inl.gov". Odd. --Fastfission 04:06, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I work at Argonne. Argonne West became Idaho National Laboratory. I've removed it earlier today. Klaus 7 August, 2005

Scientific User Facilities
There are over 50 of these DOE user facilities and only a few stubs currently exist to describe them in Wikipedia. The largest of the DOE scientific user facilities attracts over 3,000 research users each year. Klaus 7 August, 2005

List of scientific user facilities
Man this list is not right on this article "List of scientific user facilities"...way out Scott 13:02, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Userboxes / User Categories
Can we make a user category for DoE Office of Science researchers, or perhaps one for each lab? I created a userbox for JLab at User:Nicole Sharp/Userbox:JLab and there is one for Argonne at wikiversity:user:marshallsumter. Nicole Sharp (talk) 06:16, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Um, isn't NIST still considered a National Lab?
It's certainly not a DOE lab, so why does "United States national laboratories" redirect here? (+)H3N-Protein\Chemist-CO2(-) 10:57, 24 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, I've reorganized some of the national lab related content. Now everything is covered under one of two pages, either List of US DOE National Laboratories or United States national laboratories. If anyone feels that I've incorrectly categorized any labs, then of course feel free to (re)reorganize these pages. I just don't think the original solution of redirecting 'National Labs' to 'DOE National Labs' without any disambiguation was the correct way to deal with this. I was hoping to wait for consensus, but no one appeared interested in discussing it. (+)H3N-Protein\Chemist-CO2(-) 13:03, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Article Review
This is a great succinct article with relevant information. All the citations are up to date and well organized. -- Rafaorozco (talk) 23:57, 28 January 2017 (UTC)


 * I also agree that this article is well written and has great citations that make this source a dependable one.Sakthikumar arizona (talk) 03:07, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

Missing National Lab
Page is outdated, Frederick National Lab as part of the NCI became the 18th National Lab in 2012. Source from the NCI in the link below. https://www.cancer.gov/about-nci/organization/nci-frederick/about 2601:147:4782:3A50:3551:6756:2AAB:4FD9 (talk) 15:15, 9 May 2024 (UTC)