May 6, 2026 -- Alexandria, VA. Coherent Digital is pleased to announce the launch of Global Technical Reports, a new collection on its Applied Science Commons platform that preserves the full-text record of the U.S. National Technical Reports Library (NTIS-NTRL), backfills a decade of coverage that NTIS-NTRL stopped providing, and extends the original collection's scope to government-funded research worldwide.
Over two million items, one collection
Technical reports are the working record of applied science. They document how bridges are tested, how aircraft are designed, how vaccines are trialed, and how energy systems are built. They are the quiet, essential literature behind nearly every advance in engineering, defense, transportation, energy, and public health. NTIS-NTRL gathered them from US institutions into a single, searchable collection that libraries and researchers relied on.
Over the past two decades, that coverage quietly contracted. In 2006, NTIS indexed 133 U.S. government agencies in NTRL. By 2025, it indexed only one. Thousands of reports were no longer indexed and preserved as funding declined. Valuable content was left scattered and at risk across scores of websites. Global Technical Reports restores what was lost and expands on it, bringing together more than 1.5 million items from 1926 to the present, sourced from 175+ government laboratories and institutes.
Technical reports as a primary R&D record
Coverage is global in scope, drawing on national laboratories, defense research centers, energy agencies, infrastructure institutes, and public health bodies across the United States, Europe, and Australasia — governments whose advanced R&D systems produce the technical literature that shapes public infrastructure, safety standards, and industrial and defense innovation.
For libraries, faculty, and students, the collection fills a long-standing gap in digital primary sources. Applied science is often studied through textbooks and peer-reviewed journals, but the working record of how problems were actually solved—how a structure failed, how a protocol was validated, how a technology moved from prototype to deployment—lives in technical reports. This collection makes that record discoverable again.
"Applied science is often measured in patents and publications, but it is lived in the technical reports that document how things were actually built, tested, and learned from," said Toby Green, publisher at Coherent Digital. "Government laboratories do the slow, essential work that underpins public infrastructure, yet their reports rarely survive the end of a program or the retirement of a website. By preserving over 900,000 historical items from NTIS-NTRL and extending coverage to the FFRDCs and their international equivalents, we're filling a gap with a unique, cross-searchable technical corpus that did not exist before."
Interdisciplinary Resource
Global Technical Reports supports teaching and research across engineering and applied science, defense, security and dual-use technologies, energy and climate, infrastructure, and public health. Faculty can build assignments around primary sources that show how applied research is actually conducted.
Graduate students and researchers gain access to the evidence base behind modern infrastructure, safety standards, and public policy. Engineering and government information librarians can rebuild long-neglected areas of their technical collections, and FDLP regional libraries gain a trusted resource that supports their statutory mandate to preserve federal publications.
One platform, flexible access
Global Technical Reports is one of several collections on Applied Science Commons — Coherent Digital's platform for applied-science grey literature, sourced from more than 13,000 organizations including governments, hospitals, corporations, and research centers, across technical reports, white papers, case studies, and multimedia.
Libraries can purchase individual collections such as Global Technical Reports to fit specific programs and budgets, or subscribe to Applied Science Complete to access every collection on Applied Science Commons, fully cross-searchable with a single license and a single point of access.
Availability
Libraries interested in a free trial can request access here.
Global Technical Reports is available for purchase, subscription, and trials, with consortium pricing through CRL, BTAA, LYRASIS, Jisc, and CRKN.
Two related Coherent Digital platforms work alongside Applied Science Commons: Policy Commons, the companion real-world literature database covering think tanks, IGOs, NGOs, and governments worldwide, and Coherent Impact, which tracks how research is cited and used across policy and applied literature.
About Coherent Digital
Coherent Digital identifies, curates, indexes, and preserves real-world information, and tracks and drives the impact of research across policy, practice, and public life. Libraries, universities, and research institutions worldwide rely on us for critical policy, technical and research reports; primary sources; materials from the Global South; and books and magazines beyond traditional academic publishing. We make it accessible and useful to students, researchers, and policymakers — turning real-world content into real-world impact.