November 30, 2015. CHORUS, a non-profit organization, announced an agreement with the National Science Foundation (NSF), as part of the agency’s continued commitment to expand public access to the results of its funded research.
The new agreement is in accordance with the NSF public access plan, which was released on March 18, 2015. NSF’s public access plan is intended to accelerate the dissemination of fundamental research results that will advance the frontiers of knowledge and help ensure the nation’s future prosperity.
Jim Kurose, NSF Assistant Director who heads the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate and also has a leadership role in NSF’s public access initiative, commented, “Public access to the results of NSF-funded research is critical to advancing the frontiers of science and engineering, and we are very much looking forward to working with CHORUS to help further our public access goals.”
NSF will employ the CHORUS service to build on open standards, distributed networks and established infrastructure to enable agency indexing of articles, advance access to publicly available research articles, and enable the long-term preservation of and access to scholarly articles reporting on NSF-funded research.
“CHORUS is honored to be working with the NSF to implement public access,” said Howard Ratner, Executive Director of CHORUS. “The NSF-CHORUS effort is an important step to advance broad-based, sustainable public access, providing a roadmap for a successful public/private collaboration that yields benefits for the public and promotes the needs of all involved in scholarly communications.”
Per this new agreement, the CHORUS service will support NSF’s existing partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information to provide distributed repository and search services linking to the best available version on publishers’ sites when possible.
As with the DOE, the NSF system will dovetail with the interoperable CHORUS framework, along with CrossRef’s Open Funder Registry, to provide the article submission workflow for grantees and facilitate public access to all articles that report on NSF funded research. CHORUS enables readers searching the NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR), hosted by DOE, to follow links that point to articles in context of the journal where they were published.
The CHORUS service is provided free of charge to federal agencies. For workflow details, please contact NSF or CHORUS.
For questions about the NSF public access plan, please see the FAQ page. The plan is consistent with White House Office of Science and Technology Policy efforts to science-funding agencies to develop plans to increase access to the results of federally funded research.
About NSF
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2015, its budget is $7.3 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives about 48,000 competitive proposals for funding, and makes about 11,000 new funding awards. NSF also awards about $626 million in professional and service contracts yearly.
About CHORUS
CHORUS advances sustainable, cost-effective public access to articles reporting on funded research in ways that benefit all in the scholarly communications community. A not-for-profit membership organization, CHORUS leverages existing infrastructure, promotes collaboration, sparks innovation, and broadens the dialogue among publishers, funders, service providers, researchers, and other stakeholders.
Contacts
National Science Foundation: Sarah Bates mailto:sabates@nsf.gov
CHORUS: Susan Spilka mailto:sspilka@chorusaccess.org
