Indifference or delegation? - Research Information

“Later this month the PEER project will be presenting its end-of-project findings into the challenges and effects of green open access... Since 2008, PEER, which stands for Publishing and the Ecology of European Research, has been investigating the systematic deposit of thousands of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts into six European repositories and one long-term archive and making them freely available to any researcher or member of the public with internet access. The project was set up – with euro 4.2 million in funding, half from the European Union and half from the project partners – to find out what effect green open access (OA) might have on reader access, author visibility, and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research. One of the interesting features of the project is the involvement of heavyweight scholarly publishers. Arguably publishers have the least to gain and the most to lose from green OA being a success. Nonetheless, the PEER project includes 12 major publishers, many of whom have faced criticism from proponents of green OA. These publishers collectively made available content from 241 journals in four broad subject areas... the author response to the PEER project seems strange. The initial project plan was to populate the repositories with half the articles submitted by publishers and half by author self archiving. As Julia Wallace, project manager of PEER, told delegates at the recent UKSG conference in Glasgow, 11,800 invitations to submit to the repositories via the PEER depot were sent to authors. Despite this large number of invitations however, only 170 papers were self archived by authors. Indeed the author response was so low that half way through the project the PEER team had to increase the proportion of papers that needed to be deposited by publishers in order to have enough material available for the subsequent analysis. In total, more than 53,000 manuscripts were submitted to PEER... the PEER experiences seem to correspond with those of many repositories. Even where there are mandates to deposit and not complying with the mandate could affect future funding... ‘There is anecdotal evidence that some researchers consider making journal articles accessible via open access to be beyond their remit,’ observed the report on behaviour research published late last year and carried out by a team at the Department of Information Science and the LISU group of Loughborough University, UK as part of the PEER project. The study also found that only a minority of researchers associated open access with self archiving, and those researchers were mainly in physics and related areas where there is a long-standing tradition of self archiving in the ArXiv repository...”