Welcome New Members!

CHORUS now has 27 members (24 Publisher Members and 3 Affiliate Members).  Our ranks are growing every week — new members include:

• American Meteorological Society
• American Mathematical Society
• American Astronomical Society
• AVS: Science & Technology of Materials, Interfaces and Processing .

With a majority of non-profit organizations as members and on our Board of Directors, CHORUS presents a great opportunity for small societies and publishers to make a big impact in the development of a sustainable public access solution. To encourage greater participation among that group, CHORUS added an even more affordable membership fee tier. We also made adjustments to our fees for Affiliate Members, to enable more innovative publishing service providers to formalize their role in the collaboration. Information about joining CHORUS can be found here.

Bringing Public Access to the Surface 

CHORUS enables transparency about what, when, and where our members’ journal articles reporting on funded research and the associated data are freely accessible, where and how they are preserved, how the content and data may be used, and who funded the underlying research. With each new member, CHORUS makes more publicly accessible content visible to all. We estimate that we currently monitor approximately 9,000 journals that our members collectively publish (we’ll be reaching out to members in the near future to get more precise data on the number of journals and articles they publish.)

This growth is clearly evident on our agency dashboards, which currently track 279,016 of our members’ articles that have been assigned a unique CrossRef DOI and associated with one of 22 funding agencies through CrossRef’s FundRef (CHORUS members are obliged to implement FundRef within a year.)

The aggregated data below show that CHORUS dashboards now report on nearly all of the articles (89,872 out of 92,005 as of 1 May 2015) published by our members who have already implemented FundRef (a CHORUS obligation within a year of joining). Nearly a third of them (24,760) are already publicly accessible, months before most agency plans take effect. The dashboards also show the breakdown among publishers as well as how many of the articles have accessible reuse terms and are suitably archived for perpetual public access.

As more members join and complete CHORUS implementation, we expect these numbers to rapidly climb.

Citations

CHORUS was named among the “Ten to Watch” in Open Access 2015: Market Size, Share, Forecast, and Trends. which explores the changing face of open access. The report was recently published by Outsell, Inc., a leading research and advisory firm focused on media, information, and technology. When Outsell VP and Lead Analyst Deni Auclair presented report highlights last month at the STM (International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers) Annual Conference, she characterized CHORUS as “leading the charge in enabling public access….”

In another session at the conference, the STM Association CEO Michael Mabe mentioned CHORUS in his presentation of highlights of The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing, Fourth Edition. CHORUS is discussed on page 111 of the downloadable report, which published in March 2015. The STM Association also launched Technology Trends for 2015, which are represented in the infographic below.

CHORUS on the Road

CHORUS will be attending the 37th Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing May 27-29 in Arlington, VA. Don’t miss SSP Chairman/CHORUS Executive Director Howard Ratner’s opening remarks.  He will be joined by Amy Brand, Digital Science, to share the results of a study Digital Science conducted with Professor Albert Greco of Fordham University and a number of professional societies, including SSP, STM, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), and the Council of Science Editors (CSE) on the demographics and education of scholarly publishing and communication professionals.

Also on the SSP agenda is a panel on the Challenges of Compliance, moderated by Oxford University Press’ David Crotty, who also serves as a CHORUS Board member and the Scholarly Kitchen’s Executive Editor. This session will bring together leaders from the global scholarly community to discuss the compliance burden for libraries, explore challenges and solutions for publishers moving to an author services model, share insights and data about the costs to complying with open access (OA) requirements, and provide an update on CHORUS’ efforts to make compliance more streamlined and cost-effective. Panelists include Rob Johnson, founder and director of Researching Consulting UK; Roy Kaufman, Managing Director of New Ventures, Copyright Clearance Center; and Judy Russell, Dean of University Libraries, University of Florida.

Howard will be presenting about CHORUS at the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OA19), June 17-19, at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.