Implementing CHORUS: Big Decisions Loom for Publishers | The Scholarly Kitchen

"Shortly after the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released its memo regarding public access to federally funded research in February 2013, The Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States (CHORUS) was born. This publisher-driven initiative was one of a few that took on the charge of responding to the requirements detailed in the OSTP memo. The development of CHORUS has moved very swiftly, in publishing terms, and relies heavily on existing infrastructure as well as new tools that were already in development. A few weeks back, CHORUS released their CHORUS Publisher Implementation Guide and held workshops and spoke at several recent industry conferences. The implementation is not without complications. Publishers need to make some pretty serious decisions on how to proceed. The biggest decision may be exactly what to expose in order to comply with any forthcoming public access mandates. The options are to make the accepted manuscripts (AM) publicly available for papers derived from federal funds or to allow access to the final PDF or version of record (VoR). Either is acceptable under federal requirements. The next single most important question may be whether to impose an embargo and the duration of the embargo period. The OSTP memo allowed for embargo periods of up to 12 months but with consideration for longer embargoes for fields that may support it. In the end, the question of embargo periods may be moot as the agencies are likely to set maximums as part of their public access policies. Publishers could choose to implement a shorter time period or no time period at all, but 12 months seems to be the likely default, at least as things start. Before we look at what publishers will provide, let’s remember that public access is not the same as open access. Under the guidelines laid out in the OSTP memo, the federal government is not offering to pay article processing fees in order to make papers open access. What the memo asks is that 'any results published in peer-reviewed scholarly publications that are based on research that directly arises from Federal funds' be made publicly available ..."