PEER - Behavioural Research: authors/journals/repositories

["Janice Kuta, STM" <kuta@stm-assoc.org>]

PEER -- Publishing and the Ecology of European Research
News release

1 February 2010

PEER Behavioural Research: Baseline report on authors and users 
vis-a-vis journals and repositories now available at 
http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/

The PEER Behavioural Research Team from Loughborough University 
(Department of Information Science & LISU) has completed its 
behavioural baseline report, which is based on an electronic 
survey of authors (and authors as users) with more than 3000 
European researchers and a series of focus groups covering the 
Medical sciences; Social sciences, humanities & arts; Life 
sciences; and Physical sciences & mathematics.

The objectives of the Behavioural Research within PEER are to:

* Track trends and explain patterns of author and user behaviour 
in the context of so called Green Open Access.
* Understand the role repositories play for authors in the 
context of journal publishing.
* Understand the role repositories play for users in context of 
accessing journal articles.

The baseline report outlines findings from the first phase of the 
research and identifies the key themes to emerge. It also 
identifies priorities for further analysis and future work. Some 
interesting points to emerge from the first phase of research 
that may be of interest to a number of stakeholders in the 
scholarly communication system include:

* An individual's attitude towards open access repositories may 
change dependant on whether they are an author or a reader; 
readers being interested in the quality of the articles but 
authors also focused on the reputation of the repository itself
* Reaching the target audience is the overwhelming motivation for 
scholars to disseminate their research results and this strongly 
influences their choice of journal and/or repository
* Researchers in certain disciplines may lack confidence in 
making preprints available, and to some extent this is not only a 
matter of confidence in the quality of a text but also due to 
differences in work organisation across research cultures (e.g. 
strong internal peer review of manuscripts versus reliance on 
journals for peer review). Other factors are likely to include 
career stage and centrality of research to the parent discipline
* Value-added services, such as download statistics and alert 
services, would contribute to the perceived usefulness of 
repositories and could help them gain popularity in what is an 
increasingly competitive information landscape
* Readers often need to go through a variety of processes to 
access all the articles that they require and widespread open 
access may reduce the need for this time consuming practice.

The full report is available from 
http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/

PEER Behavioural Research Team

Dr Jenny Fry, Professor Charles Oppenheim, Dr Stephen Probets,
Department of Information Science, Loughborough University

Claire Creaser, Helen Greenwood, Valerie Spezi, Sonya White
LISU, Loughborough University

For enquiries relating to Behavioural Research or other research 
areas within PEER, please contact Chris Armbruster: 
armbruster@mpdl.mpg.de

For enquiries relating to PEER, please e-mail: peer@stm-assoc.org

About PEER:
PEER is a pioneering collaboration between publishers, 
repositories and the research community, which aims to 
investigate the effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing 
of authors' final peer-reviewed manuscripts (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 over 240 journals will become 
available for archiving.

PEER is supported by the EC eContentplus programme.

PEER Partners: International Association of Scientific, Technical 
and Medical Publishers (STM), the European Science Foundation, 
Goettingen State and University Library, the Max Planck Society, 
INRIA, SURF Foundation and University of Bielefeld

STM publishers participating in PEER: BMJ Publishing Group; 
Cambridge University Press; EDP Sciences; Elsevier; IOP 
Publishing; Nature Publishing Group; Oxford University Press; 
Portland Press; Sage Publications; Springer; Taylor & Francis 
Group; Wiley-Blackwell

PEER repositories: eSciDoc.PubMan.PEER, Max Planck Digital 
Library (MPDL),

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der Wissenschaften e.V. 
(MPG); HAL, CNRS & Institut National de Recherche en Informatique 
et en Automatique (INRIA); Goettingen State and University 
Library (UGOE); Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania; 
University Library of Debrecen, Hungary, SSOAR (GESIS ? Leibniz 
Institute for the Social Sciences)
Long-term preservation service: Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National 
Library of The Netherlands)

Janice E. Kuta
Director of Membership & Marketing
International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical 
Publishers