CHORUS (the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States) has partnered with a number of federal agencies over the past six months to help them comply with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directives requiring open access to federally funded research. The United States Department of Energy (DOE), the Smithsonian Institution, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have all reached agreements with CHORUS. CHORUS was formed as a not-for-profit membership organization in 2013 in response to the OSTP memo, which required all federal funding agencies to develop public access plans for sharing both research data and peer-reviewed publications. Using metadata such as funder identifiers, award numbers, and Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCIDs), CHORUS provides stable digital identifiers to full-text peer-reviewed articles after an embargo period, customarily 12 months. These can then be accessed by funders, institutions, researchers, publishers, and the public through CHORUS’s open application programming interfaces (APIs), which include search and dashboard services. CHORUS identifies federal funding through Funding Data, previously called FundRef, which collects funding source information for publications deposited with the nonprofit citation linker Crossref. The directive called for agencies to offer free public access to the best available full-text version of scholarly articles whose research they had funded—either the version of record, as published on the journal’s website, or the accepted manuscript, which contains the same information but has not been copyedited or converted to XML. Each agency was free to develop its own open access plan. Many had their own repositories or portals in place; nonetheless a number turned to CHORUS for additional support in managing access to content and metadata.

A FIRST WAVE

The DOE was the first agency to join forces with CHORUS, announcing the partnership in August 2015 after signing on the previous April. In an April blog post, DOE deputy director of resource management Jeffrey Salmon noted, “Through OSTI [the Office of Scientific and Technical Information], DOE and its predecessor agencies have been providing public access to research since 1947. This has meant keeping up with and implementing radically changing technology across decades…. Recently, DOE signed an agreement with CHORUS describing the actions each will take to ensure greater public access and fulfill OSTP requirements… Formalizing this collaboration can only propel our acquisition process leading to more comprehensive coverage of the landscape of articles.” On August 4 the DOE launched a beta version of its online portal to funded articles, the Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science (PAGES) website, through OSTI. PAGES was developed to work with CHORUS, which would link out to publishers’ websites from within the PAGES search results. Several days earlier, the American Physical Society (APS), which publishes more than a dozen scientific journals including the Physical Review, released an initial wave of DOE-funded articles through CHORUS. Also in August, the Smithsonian Institution also announced its partnership with CHORUS as part of its Public Access Plan. In October, the NSF followed suit, signing an agreement with CHORUS that was announced in late November. The agreement built on NSF’s Memorandum of Understanding with the DOE to use its PAGES database to collect manuscripts, and in accordance with the public access plan the NSF had released in March, similarly incorporated CHORUS to establish an infrastructure for access to research articles, indexing, and long-term preservation; CHORUS partners with Portico and CLOCKSS for archival storage. NSF assistant director Jim Kurose, who heads the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate and also has a leadership role in NSF’s public access initiative, commented, “Public access to the results of NSF-funded research is critical to advancing the frontiers of science and engineering, and we are very much looking forward to working with CHORUS to help further our public access goals.”

STALEMATE AND SUCCESS

In November the USGS, a federal science agency for the U.S. Department of the Interior, came aboard as well. USGS’s plan incorporates similar services, applying them to funding resulting from proposals submitted or due starting in January. As with the previous partners, the agency will maintain its own repository—the USGS Publications Warehouse (a database, not a physical building)—and incorporate CHORUS search and dashboard functionalities. The agreement, CHORUS executive director Howard Ratner said in a statement, “represents an important next step in a successful public/private collaboration that is yielding benefits for the public and promoting the needs of all involved in scholarly communications around water, earth, and biological sciences.“ USGS is unique, bureau approving official and hydrologist Keith Kirk told LJ, in that its original enabling legislation from the 19th century required the agency to provide information to the public in different ways than most other federal agencies. But although it signed with CHORUS in November, the two entities are still in the process of linking the data. Even though USGS was one of the earliest agencies to send OSTP its draft plan, Kirk explained, it fell victim to complications involving the fact that it is a bureau of the cabinet-level Department of the Interior. OSTP originally called for all other Department of the Interior bureaus to comply at the same time, but eventually dropped the requirement. “If you look at other large federal agencies,” said Kirk, “you’ll see that in many cases subgroups within those agencies have their own separate plans, and so we weren’t setting precedent. It was just that we had this stalemate between the Department of the Interior and OSTP.” OSTP and OMB gave USGS clearance for its Public Access Plan in early January. “So right now, even though we have this agreement, our anticipated effective date for full operation…is October 1, 2016.”

PILOT PROJECT

Not every agency was ready to sign on for the long term, however. In December, CHORUS and NIST announced a pilot project to be conducted over the following year. NIST, which funds research in fields from forensic science to firefighting, issued its plan in April, which called for NIST-funded articles to publicly available through PubMed Central, a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences literature hosted by the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine. In addition to using CHORUS to discover and link out to articles not deposited by NIST, the agency plans to use usage data from both CHORUS and PubMed Central to assess readership of its scholarly and technical publications, and to develop a “CHORUS-hosted, NIST-branded public access search portal,” according to the announcement. “What I’d like to see is whether we’re able to combine the usage statistics from PubMed Central with CHORUS’s usage statistics to get a good idea of what our total usage is, so our library staff knows where to put their subscription money,” said Katherine Sharpless, open access officer and Washington editorial review board chair for the NIST Special Programs Office. She has been working with CHORUS to tweaking the agency’s dashboard, and has found them amenable to adjusting the data: “At the outset the information on their dashboard was more the sort of thing that a publisher might be interested in, rather than the kind of information that we might want to gather as far as how many papers has a particular organizational unit within NIST published in the past year, and types of reports like that.” When the year is up, NIST will evaluate the partnership and decide whether to continue.

WHY CHORUS?

While each agreement has its differences, said Ratner, they all emphasize linking to funded research content on publishers’ sites. CHORUS monitors content to make sure it’s accessible and provides the necessary authentication. One of CHORUS’s attractions is that it is funded by its member publishers and free to the agencies that use it. “Given the extremely limited budget science agencies have because of the flat funding that has occurred for over a decade,” Kirk told LJ, “we needed to have a cost-effective solution.” He added, “I think for all these agencies it’s a grand experiment.” In addition, OSTP and OMB have periodic “data calls” to various agencies to check on their compliance. CHORUS dashboards can provide those numbers easily. As Kirk described it, “When you’re a federal agency and you don’t have something like CHORUS in place and there’s a data call…everybody needs to scramble around and run in circles, and it’s a huge resource drain. Whereas with CHORUS, because they’re collecting this data continuously and in a consistent way, all that’s automated for us, and that’s a big plus.” Although most journals maintain a 12-month embargo period, fully participating agencies are mandated to provide a mechanism for the public to be able to petition for earlier access in the case of highly important research that a user needs access to immediately. If the petition is granted by the agency, it can make the article “bright” before the embargo period is over, possibly providing the accepted manuscript rather than the publication of record if the journal chooses not to comply. In addition, said Ratner, “Everything we do is open. All the information is provided by an open API, and is also provided openly on our site by our search engines and our dashboards. Everything is transparent…. So if you don’t like the way we do some things, grab the information by the API and massage the data yourselves.” In the future, Ratner told LJ, CHORUS is looking to expand the kinds of metadata it works with. “There is lots of work going on to create identifiers for datasets, so that might be something we could take advantage of too. There are also new identifiers being created for samples, like geological samples. As those become more popular and more widespread, and if they have an API that we can talk to, we will make use of that as well.” As more agency plans pass muster—only about half have been approved by OSTP so far—Ratner also sees a need for a central resource describing agency public access plans. “There aren’t many good sources for a library or anybody in academia—or for that matter in publishing—to go to, to find out all the different plans for the U.S. agencies, and what they actually say, without having to read every single one of them.” Later this year CHORUS will be forming an academic advisory board, with plans to conduct informal interviews with librarians, researchers, and academic institution funding officers to help shape its ongoing engagement. “It’s not a surprise that [our] users are mainly going to be agencies, because that’s our main focus, as well as publishers,” said Ratner. “But equally it could be the public, it could be libraries, it could be whomever really wants to make use of it.