PEER announces teams for Behavioural and Usage Research

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

The following should be of interest.

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

25 August 2009

PEER announces the appointment of teams from Loughborough 
University and University College London (UCL) for Behavioural 
and Usage Research.

Behavioural Research: Authors and Readers vis-a-vis Journals and 
Repositories

The behavioural research will be undertaken by the Department of 
Information Science and LISU at Loughborough University and has 
the following objectives:

** 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.

A baseline report is due in autumn 2009 and will be made 
available on the PEER website.

Usage Research: Journals and Repositories

The usage research will be undertaken by the UCL based CIBER 
group, with the following objectives:

** Determine usage trends at publishers and repositories;
** Understand source and nature of use of deposited manuscripts 
in repositories;
** Track trends, develop indicators and explain patterns of usage 
for repositories and journals.

The research teams were selected by the PEER Executive following 
an open tendering process and assessment by the members of the 
PEER Research Oversight Group.

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, CEO of STM which acts as Coordinator for PEER 
stated, "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."

About PEER:
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.

Further information on PEER, visit the wbsite: www.peerproject.eu
For enquiries relating to PEER, please e-mail: peer@stm-assoc.org

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; Elsevier; IOP Publishing; Nature 
Publishing Group; Oxford University Press; Portland Press; Sage 
Publications; Springer; Taylor & Francis Group; Wiley-Blackwell

PEER repositories: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der 
Wissenschaften e.V. (MPG); HAL, Institut National de Recherche en 
Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA); Goettingen State and 
University Library (UGOE); BiPrints, Universitaet Bielefeld 
(UNIBI); Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania; University 
Library of Debrecen, Hungary

Long-term preservation service: Koninklijke Bibliotheek 
(Nationale bibliotheek van Nederland)

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