Large scale deposit in repositories increases access and use

“OpenAIRE, a European initiative co-funded by the European Commission (EC), welcomes the results of the PEER project, presented on the 29 May in Brussels. Publishers, research libraries and research organisations effectively collaborated in building a controlled research environment to study the effects of green open access. Usage research in this so-called ‘PEER Observatory’ revealed that large-scale deposit of research articles results in increased access and use, including via the publisher website. Norbert Lossau, Scientific Coordinator of OpenAIRE and member of the PEER Executive, pointed out that ‘the economic research of the PEER project could not find any evidence for the hypothesis that self-archiving affects journal viability’. He called upon publishers, libraries and repositories to re-use the PEER-infrastructure for large-scale publisher-/library-assisted deposit of research articles: ‘Re-using the PEER infrastructure and stepping up the transition from subscription to gold open access journals will provide comfortable ways for researchers to comply with the important open access mandate of the European Commission which we expect to be expanded in Horizon 2020’. OpenAIRE builds up a Pan-European publication Infrastructure, bringing together 33 European countries to provide open access to European research results. It collects publications resulting from EC-funded projects with the aim of improving the visibility of European research, and supports the EC’s Open Access Pilot. Future services deployed by OpenAIRE will include the support of statistics and the creation of complex publications linking from articles to research data. OpenAIRE collaborates with publishers, repositories and data providers in order to enable seamless integration of European research into global knowledge infrastructures.”