The US’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced the release of the Health and Environmental Research Online (HERO) database. HERO seeks to provide access to the scientific studies used in making key regulatory decisions, including EPA’s periodic review of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for six major pollutants. It is part of the open government directive to conduct business with transparency, participation and collaboration.

The publicly accessible HERO database is projected to provide an easy way to review the scientific literature behind EPA science assessments, which are used to support agency decision-making. It includes more than 300,000 scientific articles including the authors, titles, dates and abstracts. In addition, through a keyword search, anyone can see information from the articles that were used to develop specific risk assessments.

HERO includes peer-reviewed literature used by EPA to develop its Integrated Science Assessments (ISA) that feed into the NAAQS review. It also includes references and data from the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), a database that supports critical agency policymaking for chemical regulation. More information on the database is available at http://www.epa.gov/hero "

Source: Knowledgespeak Newletter 3/25/10 & CHMINF Listserv.