Building a Federated System for Publicly Funded Research

Three higher education associations have formed a joint steering group aiming to build a network of repositories to provide public access to federally funded research articles and data. The proposed SHare network is a response to the White House Directivee issued in February, 2013 that requires all federal agencies providing funding of 100 + million to make publicly available the articles resulting from such funding. The SHare group is comprised of members from the Association of American Universities, Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and Association of Research Libraries. An alternative public access plan, Chorus, has been proposed by the American Association of Publishers. The issue of whether publisher groups or higher education groups should build and manage repositories of research articles resulting from federal funds is under debate.