CHORUS Gets a Boost from Federal Agencies – But Will New Approaches Make It Harder to Implement? | The Scholarly Kitchen

"Today, CHORUS and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced an agreement to use CHORUS for facilitating the discovery of NSF funded works. The news from NSF is important for CHORUS as it represents the second large funding agency to use the service. The partnership is not a huge surprise given that the NSF had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Department of Energy (DOE) to use their PAGES database to collect manuscripts that result from federal funding, and the DOE plan has already built the integration with CHORUS. In fact, the DOE was the first agency to sign an agreement with CHORUS. That said, federal agencies have not been particularly transparent about their intentions, and information is coming out in dribs and drabs ... This announcement comes on the heels of another partnership. CHORUS announced two weeks ago that the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has signed on. The USGS has a policy about making data available and collecting and getting work approved but nothing that is specific to making accepted manuscripts reviewed by journals accessible to the public, so we have little information about how this will work. It is not clear whether the USGS will collect accepted manuscripts from authors for hosting in their USGS Publications Warehouse database.  The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is in pilot phase with CHORUS, and the Smithsonian Institution is using CHORUS for linking to content.  Two major agencies we have not heard from yet are the Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency. The Department of Transportation announced their plan late last week to use their own National Transportation Library and the USDOT Research Hub for making funded works accessible after a 12 month embargo ..."