Open Access: Two plans to meet the federal mandate | ASAS Taking Stock

"In the Mar. 25, 2013 issue of Taking Stock DC, we discussed open access (OA) and the potential implications of a Feb. 22, 2013 memo from John Holdren, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), that would extend the NIH “green model of OA” to all federal funding agencies that spend more than $100 million on research and development. Earlier this month, two plans emerged to provide solutions to the federal mandate for OA. One plan, the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States (CHORUS), proposes that publishers allow the public to read federally-funded research papers for free by linking to the journal’s website. This plan would build on publishers’ existing infrastructure, avoid duplication of publication databases by federal funding agencies, minimize cost to the federal government (and taxpayers), and ensure long-term availability of published research articles. Compliance for authors and funding agencies would be streamlined because public access would automatically be integrated into the publishing system. Public access to research articles would be provided in a manner that is already familiar to scientists and they would find research results in journals that they are already familiar with. Because federal agencies would not need to develop and maintain their own databases of publications (e.g., PubMed Central), more dollars would be available for research. The NIH estimates that it costs about $3.5 million per year to maintain the PubMed Central database. CHORUS would use existing tools and services such as CrossRef to link citations across publishers through a digital object identifier (DOI) and FundRef that links federal grant numbers with published articles. A second plan, the SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE), proposes that universities and libraries would host the digital repositories and allow the public to freely access federally-funded research articles. Universities and libraries have a long history of developing tools, systems, and services to share and archive research and scholarly findings. In the SHARE proposal, each university or research institute that receives federal funding for research would identify an existing digital repository as the OA site for publications generated by its research faculty. Smaller institutions without sufficient resources to develop their own digital repository could designate a depository at one of the state’s public universities. Publications will need to have copyright release terms embedded in the metadata. Faculty will need DOI as described above to track their research activity. However, it is not clear if the final, peer-reviewed, edited, formatted version of journal articles or if the peer-reviewed (unedited and unformatted) version will be stored in these databases. And, the biggest potential problem with the SHARE proposal is that the burden of developing and maintaining these digital repositories for the long-term could represent yet another unfunded mandate to universities and ultimately increase costs of sponsored research via the pool of indirect costs. Which plan is better for ASAS?  CHORUS focuses on the green model of OA and is the best solution for scientific societies that publish scientific journals. Under the green model of OA, CHORUS gives the public open access to research publications after 1 year. CHORUS will also direct the public to websites maintained by science societies and ensure maintenance of high quality journal platforms. Implementing CHORUS under the green model is imperative for scientific societies that publish journals, because the green model of OA allows science societies like ASAS to maintain a revenue stream that covers the expense of publication ..."