“Powered by the robust infrastructure of the international scholarly publishing community, CHORUS offers the tools and services needed to efficiently and effectively support the implementation of DOE’s public access plan,” said Howard Ratner, executive director of CHOR, Inc. “We look forward to working with DOE to enable free public access to the wealth of peer-reviewed articles resulting from DOE-funded research.”

CHORUS is an information bridge, linking the public to freely accessible journal articles that report on federally funded research directly on publisher platforms, where the articles can be read and preserved in their scholarly context. CHORUS provides five core functions for the public, funding agencies, and research enterprise: identification, discovery, access, preservation, and compliance. Its open technology platform leverages publishers’ existing infrastructure, avoids duplication of effort, minimizes cost to the government, taxpayer, and grantee institutions, and ensures the continued availability of the research literature.

Since the launch of its pilot program in Fall 2013, CHORUS has quickly garnered the support of the scholarly communications community, gaining endorsements from more than 100 publishers and organizations in less than six months. It was fully launched into production on July 31, 2014.

The collaboration between DOE and CHORUS is built on a long history of engagement between the scholarly communication community and DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). In 2011, publishers worked with DOE to link research reports to scholarly publications hosted on publisher platforms. DOE also played a central role in the 2013 launch of an innovative public-private collaboration–FundRef–that identifies the funding sources for all research publications. Using the CrossRef system, the FundRef service provides essential data for operating CHORUS and any public access service. (www.crossref.org/fundref/)

Many of the scholarly publishers participating in the CHORUS pilot program worked with DOE over the last year in the development of its new public access portal–the DOE Public Access Gateway for Energy & Science, or “DOE PAGES,” project. DOE PAGES uses CHORUS to complement this content stream by providing access to scholarly publications that report on DOE-funded research on the publisher’s platform, where they can be read in context and preserved for the long term integrity of the scholarly record.

“The Department of Energy is pleased to collaborate with CHORUS on our implementation of public access to scholarly publications resulting from DOE-funded research,” said Jeffrey Salmon, deputy director for resource management in DOE’s Office of Science. “By engaging the broad participation of publishers through CHORUS and our existing infrastructure for gathering research papers, our goal is to provide the public access to the best available version of a journal article.”

“We had numerous working sessions with DOE and its stakeholders leading up to this announcement,” Ratner added, “and we welcome continued discussions with other agencies to see how CHORUS can serve their needs. CHORUS seeks to provide services that take into account the interests of all stakeholders, and we will continue to develop a system that does so.”

For more information about CHORUS see their FAQs: http://chorusaccess.org/faq/.