submitted by David Weinreich, Weinreich Strategic Group
A new report released on August 28th by the US Government Publishing Office (GPO) and the Library of Congress on “Disseminating and Preserving Digital Public Information Products Created by the U.S. Federal Government” mentions CHORUS favorably as a solution for government information, and catalogs US agency public access policies.
The GPO, like CHORUS, is dedicated to enabling permanent public access to documents. In the GPO’s case, this mission relates to information products created by US Government Agencies, while CHORUS is devoted to public access with respect to articles that report on research funded by US Government Agencies. Despite the difference in scope, we agree with the report’s findings that there are opportunities for collaboration.
In the Preface to the report, the GPO indicates that the study was undertaken help them gain “a better understanding of the information dissemination policies, strategies, and practices of Federal agencies.” This was undertaken primarily through surveys of a sample of federal agencies, as well as a review of practices across the government. The authors of the report, who are in the Federal Research Division (FRD) of the Library of Congress, then make recommendations on how to improve agency dissemination and preservation policies.
Their recommended actions include exploring “methods to automate and embed compliance,” citing CHORUS as a model for a semi-automated system that could help with Government agencies’ publications workflows. Specifically, it says:
“One possible model for a semi-automated system is CHORUS … which is currently used by the academic publishing industry to notify agencies of new manuscripts and journal articles resulting from federally funded research. Created in response to the OSTP memorandum titled “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,” CHORUS enables the identification, discovery, public access, and preservation of the documents in a long-term archive. CHORUS tracks each of those features and reports the level of compliance on its dashboards. Embedding a similar reporting system into Government agencies’ publications workflows would result in more comprehensive notifications to GPO than is provided by current methods.”
CHORUS hopes that such a recommendation will be helpful to develop additional partnerships with federal agencies, and perhaps with the GPO or Library of Congress.
Of additional interest in the report is a “Landscape Study of Federal Digital Publishing” in Appendix I. CHORUS has updated its own list of public access policies based on the report’s “Federal Access Plans for Public Information Products” on p. 48-52 which lists all public access plans, their inception dates, and the repository that is being used by the agency.
Of additional interest to the CHORUS community, the report lists agency responses to the Question: “Does Your Agency Disseminate Contractor- or Grantee-Produced Content?,” an issue for which CHORUS is well-positioned to offer assistance to these and other agencies.
