Publishers Respond In CHORUS To White House Open Access Mandate

In February, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) informed federal agencies spending more than $100 million on research to develop strategies to make published results of federal funded research publicly available. OSTP stipulated that results must be freely available within one year of publication.

Legislation to ensure access to research findings was already in the works in Congress. But FRPAA, introduced in 2012, died in committee. The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), a better version of FRPAA, was introduced shortly before OSTP’s memo. It requires that findings be available six months after publication.

Yesterday the Association of American Publishers (AAP), a group of primarily subscription based journal publishers, responded to OSTP’s mandate with a solution of their own. Called CHORUS (ClearingHouse for the Open Research of the United States), it is a system to search for federal funded science articles retrievable from each publisher’s site.