About PASS

The Public Access Submission System (PASS) is a platform to assist researchers in complying with the access policies of their funders and institutions.

While many federal agencies have policies that require research results to be made publicly accessible, the requirements to comply with these vary greatly from one agency to another. These heterogeneous processes for compliance have become burdensome for researchers and their institutions. For research that is funded by multiple agencies, it can be especially complicated to ensure compliance with each funder’s access policy.

Meanwhile, many universities have implemented an open access policy, which also requires research outputs to be made publicly accessible. As a result, each publication can be subject to multiple policies each with its own workflow and requirements.

The PASS platform offers a unified approach for compliance, allowing the researcher to fulfil the access policies of their institutions and funders through a single website.

PASS aims 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.

PASS was created by the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University, in collaboration with the Harvard University Office for Scholarly Communication, the MIT Libraries, and with inspiration from Jeff Spies, formerly of the Center for Open Science.

PASS is an open source software project. We welcome collaboration opportunities with other institutions who share our goals. Contact our team for more information, or take a look at our code base, available on GitHub.