PEER is a pioneering collaboration between publishers, repositories and the research community, which aims to investigate the effects of the large-scale deposit (so called Green Open Access) on user access, author visibility, journal viability and the broader European research environment. The project will run until 2011, during which time over 50,000 European stage-2 (accepted) manuscripts from up to 300 journals will become available for archiving.
This draft report on the provision of usage data and manuscript deposit procedures for publishers and repository managers sets out to establish a workflow for depositing stage-2 outputs in and harvesting logfiles from designated repositories to facilitate the research required for PEER.
To ensure that sufficient content is made available as a research sample to validate the research process, participating publishers have agreed to collectively deposit 50% of the outputs on behalf of the authors. For the other 50%, publishers will invite the authors to self- archive their current manuscripts, and any previous manuscripts from participating journals. In addition to workflow, the report identifies the preferred file formats for full text and metadata to be deposited by participating publishers as well as the preferred and mandatory metadata elements.
Issues of relevance to repositories are also addressed, including the proposal to unify the ingestion services either based on format used or protocols such as OAI-PMH or SWORD, as well as procedures for the provision of usage data.
An updated version of this draft report will be made available by PEER later this year.
...[T]he report reflects a team-based approach to the investigation that is appropriate to the PEER project, which brings together for the first time, disparate interest groups from the publisher, library and repository and the research communities. While in effect, a number of technical issues that were raised for discussion remain unresolved, these were noted for monitoring and further consideration in the final report, D.2.2. Good co-operation was thus established during this process that will facilitate the ongoing interaction between publishes and repositories in the course of the project.
It should be noted that the task did not require consultation with the research community, acting in PEER as representatives of the authors. The dependency of this work package on the envisaged research processes was also noted. Interaction with research tenders was not possible at the time of writing, and as a result, the author deposit workflow remains conjectural....
While this report sets out technical issues of data transfer between publishers and repositories and between authors and repositories, it is not limited in scope to technical issues, but also reflects every best effort towards the overall success of the project, and an exercise in building good will between PEER stakeholder communities....
Comment. As far as I can tell, this draft doesn't give us a glimpse of the project conclusions on the main question: the effect of high-volume OA archiving on TA journal subscriptions. If I missed it, I hope someone will let me know. Also see our past posts on the PEER project.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/15/2009 11:30:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
