“Choudhury, Associate Dean for Research Data Management and the Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at Johns Hopkins University, applied his engineering expertise to transform the campus library system’s infrastructure and technology capabilities. Most recently, he led a team that built the “Public Access Submission System” (PASS), a platform to help researchers comply with the access policies of their funders and institutions. After the 2013 White House policy requiring public access was passed, SPARC encouraged developers to create a “unified deposit portal” for manuscript deposit.
Choudhury took on the challenge to develop open source software to do just that. His goal: To embed the process of sharing research outputs into researchers’ existing workflows, and rebalance the relationship between authors, libraries and publishers. Now, with a grant from the National Science Foundation to generalize deposit into multiple federal repositories through third party applications, PASS holds promise for institutions and individuals to disseminate their scientific advances with ease….
The PASS platform is a unified approach for compliance that allows researchers to fulfill the requirements of access policies of their institutions and funders through a single website. It provides interfaces (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. Researchers can also deposit manuscripts and metadata in the repositories required or requested by the author….
Development of the platform was funded initially with money from the Office of the President at Hopkins, after the campus approved an open access policy in July of 2018. And in October, NSF provided further support with a one-year, $250,000 grant for the expansion of PASS in partnership with Arizona State University, California Digital Libraries, Duke University, Harvard University, Michigan University, and Notre Dame….”