Digital visibility is king but what colour is our Open Access future?

“Supported by the EC eContentplus programme, the PEER project (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) built an observatory to investigate the potential effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts, so called Green Open Access. Over 18,000 manuscripts were made available in participating repositories, matching with the versions of records on the publisher platforms. Earlier this week, the final reports from the PEER Project were made publicly available. The experience of building the infrastructure for the project was instructive in highlighting technical challenges and resulted in the creation of the PEER Depot, a central processing hub and ‘dark archive’ to help resolve many issue including:  [1] The non-uniformity of publisher outputs at acceptance stage and the varying requirements of repositories (file formats / metadata schemas/ metadata elements) [2] The filtering of content for EU authors and research articles [3] The lack of accurate embargo management mechanisms at repositories (embargoes were managed at the PEER Depot) The challenges of author authentication of non-local authors by repositories also led to the creation of a centralised author deposit system linked to the PEER Depot. Despite explicit invitations to deposit, author self-deposit rates were very low within PEER (