PEER appoints Loughborough and UCL universities
The 'Publishing and the Ecology of European Research' (PEER) collaboration has appointed researchers from Loughborough University and University College London to carry out research into so-called Green Open Access.
Green Open Access is the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors' peer-reviewed manuscripts. PEER aims to investigate its impact on reader access, author visibility and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research.
Behavioural research will be undertaken by the Department of Information Science and the Library Information Statistics Unit (LISU) at Loughborough University to track trends and explain patterns of author and user behaviour in the context of Green Open Access.
The researchers will also try to understand the role repositories play for authors in the context of journal publishing as well as users, when accessing journal articles.
Meanwhile, a group at the Centre for Information Behaviour and Evaluation Research (CIBER), UCL, will determine usage trends at publishing businesses and repositories while understanding the source and nature of use of deposited manuscripts. The group will also track trends, develop indicators and explain patterns of usage for repositories and journals.
Both research teams will provide final reports mid-2011 and will feed into model development to determine whether, and how, traditional publishing systems can co-exist with self-archiving.
Michael Mabe, chief executive of the International Association of STM publishers, which coordinates PEER, said: 'The research outcomes from PEER will provide valuable input to informed dialogue and decisions in the open access debate. The successful teams were selected from a range of exceptional candidates and we hope to see the same levels of quality and interest when the invitation is announced for the forthcoming Economics research tender.'
The PEER project will run until 2011, during which time more than 50,000 European stage-2 manuscripts from up to 300 journals will become available for archiving.
