The Association of American Publishers

"The plans released recently by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), NASA and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) on free access to private sector articles reporting on federally funded research fall short of advancing sustainable public access. While AAP supports efforts to expand public access to research information, these plans require unnecessary government spending that wastes taxpayer money and will ultimately harm publishers’ ability to advance science and scholarship. AAP is pleased that all three agencies recognize innovative private sector solutions and stands ready to work with federal agencies to refine their policies to address the potential harm from aspects of each agency’s approach ... The AHRQ and NASA plans call for an expanded use of the PubMed Central (PMC) repository, which duplicates infrastructure that already exists in the publishing industry, while the USDA plans to further develop and roll-out its PubAg repository system. None of these solutions are consistent with the goals in the Obama Administration’s directive to collaborate with publishers and develop new public-private partnerships.  Since no additional funds are allocated to enable public access, taxpayer money will instead be diverted from the programs and research that are at the core of each agency’s mission. At a time when research funding has been cut and taxpayers want government to stop redundancy, CHORUS(Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States) offers a collaborative approach to expanding access. In 2013 CHORUS was formed as an independent, not-for-profit service to provide public access solutions for all federal agencies at little-or-no cost to the government ..."