The not-for-profit digital archive Portico and CHORUS (Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States) have entered into an agreement to support the preservation requirements of the policy memorandum released in February 2013 by the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). This policy directs United States federal agencies to develop plans to make articles reporting on the research they fund freely available to the public immediately or after an embargo period, and highlights requirements needed to ensure long-term access to this research through preservation.
Portico already preserves more than 18,700 academic journals, including those from major scientific publishers. Through the agreement, Portico will provide CHORUS with preservation status for articles reporting on US-funded research for those publishers who are members of CHORUS as well as Portico. To ensure compliance, this group of publishers will extend their existing agreements with Portico to allow Portico to provide public access to relevant articles in the event of a public access failure, whereby an article is no longer openly available to the public through a publisher's site.
CHORUS is a suite of services and best practices that provide a sustainable solution to deliver public access to published articles reporting on funded research in the United States. CHORUS is the first initiative of the not-for-profit public-private partnership, CHOR, Inc., whose goal is to advance public access to peer-reviewed journal literature. CHORUS went into production in July 2014 with more than 100 signatories.