Non-profit organisation CHORUS has announced a pilot initiative to help the academic community effectively comply with the US Funder Public Access requirements. CHORUS signed a letter of agreement with the University of Florida (UF) and Scopus to explore how their services can be extended to institutions to monitor and increase the rate of compliance. CHORUS and Scopus are providing their services free of charge to participating institutions for the pilot's duration, which is scheduled to run through January 2017.
Building on an initiative already underway between UF and Elsevier, CHORUS' participation enables scaling it up to a multilateral, industry effort.
Research grants flow through universities and impact both revenue and reputation, thus universities have a vital interest in public-access compliance. And yet, with the research regulatory landscape becoming more complex, an institution's obligations may not be clear to all involved, especially since faculty researchers are responsible for time-consuming compliance requirements. Continuity of grant funding could be affected as funders inevitably shift toward greater enforcement of public access. It is increasingly clear that universities would benefit from a sustainable, cost-effective public-access monitoring solution − like CHORUS − to ensure a high rate of compliance and minimise the burden to researchers and institutions.
The project will design and test a workflow to identify articles written by UF staff, faculty, and students and published by CHORUS publisher members. The article metadata will be ingested into the CHORUS service, which associates the article with the US federal agencies that funded the research using the Crossref Open Funder Registry. UF will then link to the full text on member publishers' sites via the DOI. CHORUS will develop institutional dashboards to aid the institution with tracking and reporting compliance. CHORUS audits each article for public accessibility, availability of reuse licenses, and perpetual archive and preservation arrangements, and reports on the status in dashboards.
Several CHORUS publisher members are participating in the pilot, including American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, Association for Computing Machinery, Elsevier, The Rockefeller University Press and Wiley. Pilot participants will meet regularly to evaluate progress and determine next steps after the pilot concludes, which may include further development, an ongoing service customized for institutional needs, and adding more academic institutions and publishers. Participants may also explore related metadata, identifier, and compliance initiatives and map future interactions as part of their collaboration.
Additional academic institutions, CHORUS publisher members, funders, and preservation services are invited to join the pilot.
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