Universities and Libraries Offer a Plan for Public Access to Research

The Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) have collaborated to offer a plan to expand public access to research.  The plan, called Shared Access to Research Ecosystem (SHARE), is in response to the White House directive to federal agencies to make their funded research more widely available.    As the plan states:

SHARE envisions that universities will collaborate with the Federal Government and others to host cross-institutional digital repositories of public access research publications that meet federal requirements for public availability and preservation.  Universities already own and operate key pieces of the infrastructure, including digital institutional repositories, Internet2, Digital Preservation Network (DPN), and more.  These current capacities and capabilities will naturally be extended over time.  Universities have also invested in recent years in working with Principal Investigators and other campus partners on developing digital data management plans to comply with agency requirements.

Under the SHARE program, each university or research institute that gets federal research money would designate an existing digital repository “as the site where its articles will be deposited for public access and long-term preservation,” meeting the requirements of the Obama administration’s policy.  Many universities already have operational digital repositories and those that do not could join the repositories of other institutions.

Additionally, persistent digital identifies (such as ORCID) would need to be implemented in order to make SHARE a viable way to comply with the public access directive.  The proposal also calls for copyright license terms and preservation rights to be included at the outset as standards for implementation to be a true solution.

With those protocols in place, Share would be “a federated system of university repositories,” John C. Vaughn, the Association of American Universities’ executive vice president, said. “Potentially there’s a way to connect the whole corpus of U.S. higher-education institutions that receive federal research funding.”

The SHARE proposal is not the only one out there.  Publishers have developed their own solution.  It is called the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States (CHORUS).  Under this model, the public-private partners would used the existing infrastructure of the publishers to identify and provide free access to publicly supported research. 

The White House directive sets an August 22, 2013 deadline for compliance.