The 2016 discussion around an open access policy at Johns Hopkins acknowledged the increased burden a new policy would cause for faculty. US federal agencies, several private funders, and many institutions require deposit of article versions in specific repositories, creating an environment where one article might need to be deposited in 2 or more repositories. As discussions around a Hopkins open access policy continued, Sayeed Choudhury of the Digital Research & Curation Center, offered to build a technological solution to that problem. Johns Hopkins University agreed to support that work.
With collaborators 221B, MIT Libraries, and the Harvard University Office for Scholarly Communication, the DRCC created the Public Access Submission System (PASS), a platform that allows one submission to be distributed to many repositories. PASS is designed to
- Provide seamless functionality for submitting/collecting accepted manuscripts and metadata relevant to one or more agencies’ sponsored research and/or relevant to the researcher’s institution.
- Provide interfaces (e.g., APIs, SWORD, email-driven-workflows) for researchers, institutional administrators and agencies to access, collaborate on, submit, be notified about, and perhaps format accepted manuscripts and metadata.
- Deposit manuscripts and metadata in the repositories specified by the policies to which the author is subject, and/or additional repositories requested by the author.
It is vitally important that PASS is an open platform since its primary purpose is to help make research more openly available. PASS’ code is available on GitHub and information about ongoing work is provided at an OSF site. Building open infrastructure is necessary because it allows the academy to retain control of its content and metadata. Additionally, we will be able to develop our own data analytics for faculty profile systems based on academic needs rather than for-profit motives of publishers. Sheridan Libraries is proud to participate in these efforts.