New York, NY – November 5, 2018
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has signed an agreement with CHORUS to expand public access to the results of its funded research.
USDA’s Public Access Plan calls for collaboration with partners to “maximize the impact of the Federal research investment.” CHORUS will monitor compliance with open access requirements to help maintain permanent, authoritative access to articles based on USDA-funded research.
USDA’s National Agricultural Library is one of five U.S. national libraries and houses one of the world’s largest collections devoted to agriculture and its related sciences. Through its PubAg system, NAL provides open access to more than 82,000 articles and over 2,000,000 citations that are based on USDA-funded research. The PubAg portal delivers over 82,000 full-text journal articles on the agricultural sciences and includes over 2,000,000 citations. Researchers searching PubAg can follow links to open access articles and accepted manuscripts on CHORUS publisher member websites.
USDA and CHORUS have had a memorandum of understanding in place since 2016. “We are pleased to extend our work with USDA, and to help facilitate the linkage between scholarly publications, scientific datasets, and funding,” said Howard Ratner, Executive Director of CHORUS. CHORUS dashboards and reports facilitate monitoring of access to articles and data reporting on USDA research.
CHORUS’ interoperable, distributed approach is built on open standards, distributed networks and established infrastructure to facilitate sustainable open access, sharing, discoverability, reporting, and preservation of content reporting on funded research.
About USDA
USDA provides leadership on food, agriculture, natural resources, rural development, nutrition, and related issues based on public policy, the best available science, and efficient management. USDA’s federally-funded research advances the competitiveness of U.S. agriculture and promotes food security.
About CHORUS
CHORUS is creating a future where the output flowing from funded research is easily and permanently discoverable, accessible and verifiable by anyone in the world. By providing the necessary metadata infrastructure and governance to enable a smooth, low-friction interface between funders, authors, institutions and publishers in a distributed network environment, CHORUS can minimize public access compliance burdens while increasing access to literature and data in support of funder mandates worldwide.
