The Optical Society (OSA) has implemented a technology solution that effectively supports US federal agency public access requirements and helps authors comply with governmental mandates to make their federally funded articles publicly available after a 12-month embargo. By partnering with CHORUS (Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States), OSA enables an option for readers and agencies to easily discover federally funded articles published by OSA and to then access the full-text of these articles directly on OSA’s platform, OSA Publishing.
The first wave of federally funded research articles from OSA will be made available on 1 October—exactly 12 months after the Department of Energy (DOE) implemented its public access policy—and OSA is the second publisher worldwide to complete implementation of their CHORUS solution.
While the DOE was the first to implement its public access policy, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo from February 2013 requires that all federal agencies that spend more than $100 million on R&D must develop and implement public access plans that make federally funded journal articles freely available to the public after a 12-month embargo. The memo also calls for public-private partnerships to avoid duplication of effort and costs.
CHORUS is an excellent example of this type of partnership as it allows publishers to continue doing what they do best—producing, rendering and archiving content that is easily searchable and discoverable—while simultaneously providing agencies with a cost-free solution to satisfy the requirements laid out for them by the OSTP memo. To date, CHORUS has signed on more than 100 publishers and almost 40 members. These publishers collectively publish the vast majority of articles that are supported in whole or part by U.S. federal funding.
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