PEER - Project details (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research)

www.peerproject.eu

Peer-reviewed journals play a key role in scholarly communication and make an essential contribution to the progress of science and European competitiveness. The publishing and research communities agree that access to the results of European funded research is important to maximise its use and impact. However, they hold different views on whether mandated deposit in open access repositories is necessary and the embargo periods that would be appropriate. No consensus has been reached on a way forward.
The key problem is that there is no clear evidence of what the impact of archiving research outputs in open access repositories will be if implemented on a broad and systematic scale. The solution the PEER project brings is a collaboration involving the publishing, library and research communities to find out. The aim is to develop an „observatory“ to monitor the effects of systematic archiving over time. Participating publishers will collectively contribute 300 journals to the project and supporting research studies will address issues such as:

  • How large-scale archiving will affect journal viability
  • Whether it increases access
  • How it will affect the broader ecology of European research
  • Factors influencing the readiness to deposit in institutional and disciplinary repositories and the associated costs
  • Models to illustrate how traditional publishing systems can coexist with self-archiving

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, the European Science Foundation, Göttingen State and University Library, the Max Planck Society and INRIA will collaborate on this project, supported by the SURF Foundation and University of Bielefeld to involve the expertise of the EC-funded DRIVER project. This work will lead to a greater understanding of journal and repository use in the digital age, and will do much to foster trust and mutual understanding between the stakeholders in academic research and scholarly publishing.

Affiliates

SUB Göttingen departments / units involved in the project

Former project staff of the SUB Göttingen

Barbara Bayer-Schur, Prof. Dr. Norbert Lossau