November 16, 2015. CHORUS, a non-profit organization, 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 (Refer to: http://www.usgs.gov/usgs-manual/500/502-1.html). 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 (http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/) 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 publicly available, USGS will be able to “brighten” the archived version, guaranteeing compliance.

About CHORUS

CHORUS advances sustainable, cost-effective public access to articles reporting on funded research in ways that benefit all in the scholarly communications community. A not-for-profit membership organization, CHORUS leverages existing infrastructure and promotes collaboration, innovation, and a broader dialogue among publishers, funders, service providers, researchers, and other stakeholders.

About USGS

The USGS is a science organization that provides impartial information on the health of our ecosystems and environment, the natural hazards that threaten us, the natural resources we rely on, the impacts of climate and land-use change, and the core science systems that help us provide timely, relevant, and useable information.  USGS provides science for a changing world. Visit USGS.gov, and follow on Twitter @USGS and other social media channels. Subscribe to news releases via e-mail, RSS or Twitter.

Contacts

CHORUS: Susan Spilka  mailto:sspilka@chorusaccess.org

USGS: Keith Kirk mailto:kkirk@usgs.gov