Here is an article that I recently wrote for my newsletter "Inside Public Access."
DOE says OA publishers must join CHORUS
From Inside Public Access A weekly newsletter
September 2, 2014
Synopsis: The US
Energy Department says that if publishers want PAGES based public access for their OA
articles they must join CHORUS to get it. This is ironic, as the OA community
has been generally negative about CHORUS. Non-CHORUS publishers may want to ask
DOE to reconsider this policy. However a limited form of immediate public
access may be available for those publishers who do not join CHORUS. (Note: for background information see http://insidepublicaccess.com/issues/IPA_2014-08-13_DOE_confusions.pdf)
How PAGES works
This picture is a bit complicated so bear with me. The US
Energy Department (DOE) funds several billion dollars in research every year.
DOE will make the journal articles based on this research publicly accessible
via the PAGES system, which
presently operates in beta mode. PAGES also includes a lot of human activity
and document processing.
The PAGES system uses a tiered approach to provide what DOE
calls the "best available version" of each article. The highest
priority is given to the version of record posted on the publisher's website.
Second highest goes to an accepted manuscript housed in a repository. This may
also include an accepted manuscript posted on the publisher's website, but
whether it does or not has yet to be determined. The lowest priority, or
fallback position, is for DOE to post an accepted manuscript itself.
How DOE gets the links to the off site articles on the
websites and in the repositories is important here. For every article, at least
one author is supposed to report the event of publication and supply certain
metadata for that article, as well as the accepted manuscript. (Technically,
every author that used DOE funding probably has to do this.)
This metadata may include a DOI for the published article,
on the publisher's website, even when that article is behind a pay wall. DOE
will make this metadata available immediately, even though it may not make the
article itself available until the end of the embargo period.
The role of CHORUS in PAGES
CHORUS is going to supply DOE with links to the funding
related articles on the websites of its publisher members. As part of joining
CHORUS, each member publisher agrees to make all articles related to US federal
funding open no later than after the federal embargo period ends. However, some
articles may become open sooner and PAGES will provide access to them at this
earlier date. Thus all CHORUS based OA articles will be made immediately
accessible via PAGES.
Note that being PAGES accessible involves more than merely
having a DOI link posted in the PAGES metadata. It means, among other things,
being indexed by PAGES and thus included in the PAGES search system.
OA publishers who are not in CHORUS
The question thus arises as to what happens to DOE funding
related OA articles on the websites of publishers who are not members of
CHORUS? The VoR is immediately available for public access, as far as the
publisher is concerned. According to DOE these articles will not be made fully
PAGES available immediately. Their availability will be limited to the fact
that each will have a DOI listed in the article's metadata, just as though it were
behind a pay wall.
It appears, moreover, that the fact that such articles are
not behind pay walls will not be indicated in the metadata. Thus there is a big
difference between being available via a metadata link and being fully PAGES
available. Full PAGES availability includes a lot of discovery that a metadata
link simply does not provide.
CHORUS is required for immediate PAGES access
In short, the only way an OA publisher can get their
articles made fully PAGES available upon publication is by joining CHORUS. This
requirement does not seem to be spelled out anywhere in the DOE Public Access
plan.
Here is what the DOE
plan says about CHORUS: "The
publishing community is developing a multi-publisher portal, the Clearinghouse
for Open Research of the United States (CHORUS), to provide access to journal
articles resulting from government funding. Such an activity offers
considerable economies in the integration of article metadata and links for
publishers who want to participate in DOE’s public access efforts. PAGES,
however, can operate successfully independent of CHORUS." (Page 8)
The last sentence above says that PAGES can operate
successfully without CHORUS. It appears however that OA publishers wanting
PAGES access cannot operate successfully without CHORUS. This is nowhere
mentioned in the DOE plan, but it appears to be a major requirement. The key is
that there is nothing in the plan about publishers submitting links to their
articles, other than via CHORUS. In effect this omission makes the rule in
question.
Moreover, DOE has confirmed this interpretation. In our correspondence,
DOE summed up their policy with this statement: "At this time, DOE's engagement with the publishing community is through
CHORUS."
The CHORUS membership requirement does make sense from an
administrative standpoint. Former OSTI director Walt Warnick points out that
CHORUS saves DOE the considerable effort of dealing with each publisher
independently, one at a time. This effort is a significant cost for PubMed
Central.
However, OA publishers may not be thrilled with having to
join CHORUS in order to get immediate, full PAGES access for their articles.
There is also the question as to whether DOE can show this sort of favoritism. The
DOE quotation above suggests that the present situation may change in the
future. Perhaps the non-CHORUS publishers will raise this issue with DOE.
Conclusions
That only CHORUS members will get immediate, full PAGES
access for OA articles is a surprising policy, and a questionable one on DOE's
part. This DOE policy seems not to have been disclosed but it should be deeply
discussed before it becomes final. CHORUS is a great idea but that may not
justify making CHORUS membership a requirement for full PAGES access.
__________________________________________________________________
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