CHORUS - A solution for public access

The Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States (CHORUS) is a not-for-profit publicprivate partnership to provide public access to the peer-reviewed publications that report on federally funded research. CHORUS also provides enhanced search capabilities and links the public to articles directly on publisher platforms, where the articles can be read and preserved in their scholarly context. CrossRef provides the infrastructure for linking to the article or other document and collecting and retrieving the funding information, and CHORUS takes care of the rest. The CHORUS pilot program was launched in Fall 2013. It quickly garnered the support of the scholarly communications community, gaining endorsements from more than 100 publishers and organizations in less than six months. This is a report on the presentation that I gave on CHORUS at the APE conference in January 2014. Since that time, the CHORUS pilot concluded and moved into full production on July 31, 2014. (See: http://chorusaccess.org/.) Let me briefly reiterate the chronology of public access policy in the United States, which is expected to culminate as the year progresses in a federal open access policy for all large research funders. Next, I sketch three solutions for providing open access – as proposed by stakeholders. I then clarify the goals of CHORUS, the solution proposed by the publishing community. Subsequently, I turn in more detail to how CHORUS works. Finally, I look at the road ahead.