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 open access compliance burdens while increasing access to literature and data in support of funder mandates worldwide.
The first initiative of CHOR, Inc., a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, CHORUS leverages widely used technology to facilitate a simple compliance process, optimized search and dashboard services, and multi-party archiving and preservation capabilities.
Powered by the Crossref Open Funder Registry and other open technologies, CHORUS is interoperable with other open access and public access delivery solutions, agency search portals, publisher platforms, and scholarly repositories and archives. Built on proven infrastructure, CHORUS minimizes costs to publishers, overheads for funders, and administrative burden for authors.
More than 50 publishers – who collectively publish the vast majority of articles reporting on publicly funded research – have joined CHORUS. New articles are continuously added and freely accessible to the public on the publishers’ sites, either immediately on publication or after a designated embargo period.
This streamlined and cost-effective approach delivers value to funders, publishers, researchers, institutions, and the public at each point in the process of enabling open access:
IDENTIFICATION: Simply naming the funding source during the article submission process adds metadata from the Crossref Open Funder Registry, which triggers open access to the article. This easy step minimizes the time researchers have to spend on administrative tasks.
DISCOVERY: Users can quickly find the latest research articles via agency portals and common search engines, as well as through CHORUS’ optimized search application. CHORUS’ open programming and interface invites innovators to develop new tools and functionality that further support open access and facilitates text/data mining on funded research.
ACCESS: CHORUS points users to the best available version of articles on their publication sites, where they can find essential context, tools, and information, either immediately on publication or after an embargo period.
COMPLIANCE: Compliance is easy using simple tagging built into the article submission process, while a CHORUS dashboard application facilitates monitoring and reporting by funders and publishers without adding unnecessary costs and administrative overhead.
PRESERVATION: CHORUS ensures the integrity and sustainability of the scholarly record through partnerships with CLOCKSS, Portico, and other services that archive and preserve research articles in perpetuity.