Access to Research: CHORUS Announces Agreement with U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
From a CHORUS Announcement:
CHORUS [has] announced that they have signed an agreement with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a science agency for the US Department of the Interior, a federal agency, to work together to implement the plan to increase public access to publications resulting from research funded by USGS. The agreement, which is effective immediately, will help move USGS’s effort to the next phase of their existing public-access framework.
The USGS public-access plan builds on the objectives set forth in the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s February 22, 2013 memorandum and long-standing USGS policies encouraging data sharing and communication of research results.
It will apply to new awards resulting from proposals submitted, or due, on or after January 2016.
“CHORUS is honored to work with the USGS to help realize their public-access solution,” said Howard Ratner, Executive Director of CHORUS. “The USGS-CHORUS agreement represents an important next step in a successful public/private collaboration that is yielding benefits for the public and promoting the needs of all involved in scholarly communications around water, earth, and biological sciences.“
The agreement outlines how USGS and CHORUS will work together to build on open standards, distributed network, and established infrastructure to enable agency indexing of articles, advance access to publicly available research articles, and enable the long-term preservation and access to scholarly articles reporting on USGS-funded research.
The USGS system will dovetail with the interoperable CHORUS framework, along with CrossRef’s FundRef service, to provide the article submission workflow for grantees and facilitate access to the best available version of USGS publications on the publishers’ websites. The articles will be discoverable via prominently displayed links on search results on the USGS Publications Warehouse as well as common search engines and CHORUS Search.
CHORUS provides a freely available USGS Dashboard that verifies and reports on whether articles are publicly accessible. In addition, CHORUS publisher members are obligated to archive their content with a recognized archive partner to enable perpetual public accessibility. As a result, if a journal goes out of business or stops making the article.
On a Related Note
FROM LAST WEEK: USGS Releases Searchable Database Featuring Geo-Referenced Copyright and Royalty-Free Field Photographs
Filed under: Awards, Dashboards, Data Files, News, Preservation, Publishing, Reports, Scholarly Communications
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.