Universities and Libraries Envision a 'Federated System' for Public Access to Research - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"As federal agencies scramble to meet an August 22 deadline to comply with a recent White House directive to expand public access to research, a group of university and library organizations says it has a workable, higher-education-driven solution. This week, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, and the Association of Research Libraries are offering a plan they call the Shared Access Research Ecosystem, or Share.

Share would expand on systems that universities and libraries have long been building to support the sharing and preservation of research. The groups behind Share have been circulating a document, dated June 7, that lays out the basics behind the idea…

Under Share, each university or research institute that gets federal research money would designate an existing digital repository “as the site where its articles will be deposited for public access and long-term preservation,” meeting the requirements of the Obama administration’s policy. Many universities already have digital repositories up and running. Those that do not could piggyback on the repositories of other institutions. A smaller institution could designate one of its state’s public universities as its deposit site, for instance.

The document also emphasizes elements that would be essential to make Share a viable way to comply with the new public-access policy. For example, principal investigators would need identifiers such as Orcid numbers to track their research activity, and every publication would need to have copyright-license terms embedded in its metadata so that repository systems would know how to handle it.

With those protocols in place, Share would be “a federated system of university repositories,” John C. Vaughn, the Association of American Universities’ executive vice president, said in an interview. “Potentially there’s a way to connect the whole corpus of U.S. higher-education institutions that receive federal research funding.”…"