Back in February, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum to federal science agencies on public access for research results. Federal agencies with over $100 million in research funding have until August 22 to submit their access plans to OSTP. This access includes research publications, metadata on those publications, and underlying research data (in a digital format).
A collection of academic publishers, including the Association of American Publishers and the organization formerly known as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (publisher of Science), has offered a proposal for a publishing industry repository for pubic access to federally funded research that they publish. This would be a one-stop shop, rather than a collection of agency repositories along the lines of PubMed Central, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) repository for public access versions of research publications produced from NIH funded research. Besides directing traffic to publisher websites, the group believes that its proposal would cost less than a comparable federal system.
I have yet to find a description of the plan, called the ClearingHouse for the Open Research of the United States (CHORUS), that hasn’t been issued by someone signed onto the program (as of this writing, most hits on a search engine for CHORUS and publishing describe an unrelated content management system). Continue reading
Pasco Phronesis 