The PEER project modeled the impact of green open access on STM publishers over 3 years with 53,000 peer-reviewed articles deposited in repositories and publisher websites. It found that repositories and publisher sites can coexist for green OA but repositories are not key for information delivery. The project infrastructure developed to support this, PEER Depot and Observatory, can now also support gold OA. Implications for RepNet include developing processes to support both green and gold OA models through building on the work done by PEER and developing a gold OA funding infrastructure.

1. PEER Conference
29th May, 2012
Andrew Dorward

2. Project overview
• Large-scale EC-funded project (€4.2 million, 3 year, 9 months) to model impact
of Green OA on STM publishers
• 5 main consortium members: STM, ESF, Uni Göttingen, Max Planck Group,
INRIA) plus input from SURF, Uni Bielefeld plus Advisory Board
• Involved 12 STM publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, IoP, OUP, Sage, BMJ,
CUP, NPG, T&F et al); 6 repositories (mix of IRs – TCD, Uni Göttingen; national
repositories – INRIA, KBN; subject repositories – MPG – no UK IRs involved.
• 53,000 pre-prints (ie Author Final Copy peer –reviewed) from 241 journals
(tertiles 1,2,3, >40% EU-sourced content) placed in repositories and publisher
websites and downloads measured
• Uni Göttingen/INRIA -developed DRIVER tools – PEER Depot, PEER
Observatory – used for large-scale publisher deposit, and infrastructure created
• Appears to demonstrate that IRs and publisher sites can happily co-exist for
Green OA
• Health warnings:
• Driven by STM, so may erect further barriers to Green OA (Peter Suber)
• Only provides a snapshot over a very limited time period with many
variables, so should not be taken as conclusive proof – needs longer study
(CIBER, Paul Ayris, UCL)
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3. The Publisher’s View (STM, MPG)
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4. Implications for RepNet
• Like RepNet, PEER started out as Green-OA focussed, but overwhelming
opinion from PEER study is that future direction will follow Gold route
• Consensus from PEER is that Green will exist as hybrid to cover switch in
business processes to gold model
• The PEER Depot and Observatory infrastructure will support both green and
Gold OA – next stage would be to build a financial infrastructure to support the
business model (Uni Bocconi)
• For the RepNet project to be relevant in 12 months, we must develop an
infrastructure and processes to support both Green and Gold OA models
• What we need to do:
• Create a new WP to model and support a Gold OA infrastructure
• Build on excellent work done by Uni Bocconi (Milan) to model cost drivers
for publishers and repositories to work on requirements of funders
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5. The Repository View (MPG)
• 11,400 invitations from publishers to authors to deposit pre-prints in IRs resulted
in only 170 deposits – why?
• OA IRs are no threat to publishers, results show IR deposit complements
publisher downloads, BUT IRs “not key to optional scholarly information delivery
systems” (MPG) – why?
• Repositories should “concentrate on research data archiving and curation which
is essential” (STM) – why?
• The PEER Depot is essential as a ‘clearing house’ for complex, unstructured
content and as a ‘dark archive’ – a feature of Green OA of pre-prints
• What does this mean for RepNet?
• Self-archiving will not drive Green OA as we want
• Clear STM agenda for publishers to control content delivery, not IRs –
should we support this?
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6. The Infrastructure View (INRIA)
• PEER Depot and PEER Observatory based on DRIVER tools produced by
SURF and Uni Göttingen
• PEER and DRIVER: PEER populates DRIVER repositories and DRIVER
facilitates access for the user community – Uni Göttingen co-ordinates
• Infrastructure now stable, proven and can be used to support Gold OA with add-
ons to support financial and business processes
• Immense technical/organisational problems around: formats (TEK, LATEK, etc);
publisher processes; publisher metadata (NLM 2.0, 3.0, Scholar 1); metadata
interchange standard (TEI); deposit (SWORD/SONEX); extracting metadata
from PDF (Grobid) – caused project to overrun by 9 months and consequent 3-
month ‘snapshot’ of download behaviour from publishers and repositories
• The PEER Depot functions – metadata consolidation and curation; embargo and
withdrawal procedures; dark archive
• PEER Observatory functions – workflow, filtering
• What does this mean for RepNet?
• RJ-Broker is vital component
• Keep open mind on Open Depot
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