Green open-access study publishes guidelines
A Europe-wide project to investigate the effects of large-scale deposit ('green open access') on user access, author visibility, journal viability and the European research environment has published guidelines for publishers and repository managers. The guidelines from the PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) project cover deposit, assisted deposit and self-archiving of journal articles.
The report provides recommendations for both publishers and repository managers and includes the use of the SWORD protocol, a standard for adding material to repositories.
PEER, which is a collaboration between publishers, repositories and the research community, will run until 2011. During this time over 50,000 European accepted manuscripts from up to 300 journals will become available for archiving. PEER is supported by the EC eContentplus programme. Its partners are International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), the European Science Foundation, Göttingen State and University Library, the Max Planck Society, INRIA, SURF Foundation and University of Bielefeld. It also includes around 11 STM publishers and six repositories.