Universities Propose to SHARE Federal Funding Based Articles | The Scholarly Kitchen

"Three academic groups have jointly floated a draft proposal in response to the US Government’s OSTP Public Access mandate memo. These groups are the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Their proposal can be found here. The public access system these groups propose to build is called SHARE which stands for SHared Access Research Ecosystem ...The idea behind SHARE is basically that of scaling up the existing institutional repositories to contain all research articles based on federal funding, as a service to the government. This includes integrating these diverse repositories into a single searchable system. The underlying premise seems to be that since the principle investigators (PIs) of the federal research grants and contracts are at the universities, then the universities can handle the article ingest process via their grants management systems.  The driving motivation for SHARE, as the name itself suggests, seems to be that of discoverability and use of the articles. The proposal features what I would call the standard wish list of Open Access (OA) functionality, up to and including data mining. Granting these wishes is a tall order for the government ... The primary shortcomings of SHARE seem to be these three: First it takes readers away from the publishers’ version of the article, reducing traffic and revenues, which will likely result in increased subscription and author charge rates. Second it imposes significant new burdens on the authors. Third it requires the government to assert a new set of rights. The benefits appear to lie in discoverability and general use, which are vague at best.  I also wonder about the apparent assumption that the lead author always works for a SHARE university. The federal public access claim seems to be on all articles reporting research funded at least in part by a federal agency. How big that part must be remains to be determined. Given the prevalence of multiple co-authors and especially international collaborations, this assumption is likely wrong in many cases, that is the PI need not be a SHARE university employee. Then too there are the national laboratories which produce a great deal of federally funded research under contract outside of the university system. In these cases the SHARE process gets decidedly more complex.  In my taxonomy of confusions the prominent features of SHARE seem to be overly complex procedures and weak factual assumptions.  Thus the complexities and burdens of SHARE seem to be significantly greater than those with the simple tagging and linking model proposed by the CHORUS group. There may indeed be a significant role for universities and university repositories to play in the overall scheme of things. But SHARE requires reinventing the wheel, recreating technologies and systems that publishers already have in place.  How this will play out in the final rulemaking remains to be seen. At this point there are basically four options on the federal table. There are CHORUS and SHARE, both of which involve public-private partnerships. Then there are two internal solutions, namely extending PubMed Central or cloning it at the agency level.  Discovery versus simplicity may turn out to be the key issue ..."