CHORUS embraces “Open for Collaboration,” an idea that has been central to our genesis, operations, and continuing evolution.

CHORUS is all about collaboration. A 501 (c)(3) charitable membership organization, CHORUS is a cooperative effort of publishers, funding agencies, technology and resource partners, and other organizations engaged in scholarly publishing for the public benefit. CHORUS members (2/3 of whom are non-profit organizations) and signatories collectively produce the vast majority of published peer review journal articles.

Substantial investments made by the scholarly community over the past 15 years — in organizations like CrossRef and their FundRef Service, ORCID, CLOCKSS, Portico, manuscript tracking systems, publisher platforms, and more — have created an open, interoperable, and scalable communications infrastructure to support the scholarly research cycle. CHORUS builds on this framework by integrating existing systems, services and open APIs with new systems, services and our own open APIs. The result is a public-access solution that balances the differing needs of our diverse scholarly community by:

• Optimizing the discovery of articles reporting on funded research,
• Advancing free public access, in perpetuity, to the best available version of these research articles,
• Driving researcher compliance with funder requirements by limiting their burden to simple steps that are already part of their workflow,
• Enhancing compliance transparency and providing valuable new data and insights with dashboard monitoring and reporting,
• Working across the spectrum of funder policies, journal platforms, manuscript tracking systems, and Green and Gold OA,
• Minimizing expense and effort for publishers, while retaining web traffic at official publication sites, and
• Providing dashboard reporting and optimized search services at no extra cost, to funders, academic institutions, and libraries.

CHORUS is more than an elegant and efficient technical solution to help rmeet government and funder requirements. It is devoted to openness at its core, equally supporting all approaches to provide that access. (For example, CHORUS works equally well with Gold and Green OA and can support funder and publisher policies with respect to embargoes.) We work to broaden the dialogue among publishers, funders, policy makers, and opinion leaders, to support public access in a way that is beneficial for all. To evolve, CHORUS staff and directors are involved in an array of initiatives exploring data, standards, and other areas of interest to the communities we serve.

CHORUS will be celebrating #oaweek by continuing our work, which reached a significant milestone recently when we enabled free access to the first group of research articles covered by the US Department of Energy’s public access policy. Please get in touch, ask questions, make suggestions, even challenge us… open, unbiased collaboration is integral to innovation and the future of scholarly communications.