The Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) recently published a draft report on the provision of usage data and manuscript deposit procedures for publishers and repository managers. The report is now available online at http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/. PEER, a joint initiative of publishers, repositories and the research community, aims to investigate the effects of large-scale deposit ('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.
The draft report sets out to establish a workflow for depositing stage-2 outputs in, and harvesting logfiles from, designated repositories to facilitate the research required for PEER. To ensure that sufficient content is made available as a research sample to validate the research process, participating publishers have agreed to collectively deposit 50 percent of the outputs on behalf of the authors. For the other 50 percent, publishers will invite the authors to self-archive their current manuscripts, and any previous manuscripts from participating journals. In addition to workflow, the report identifies the preferred file formats for full text and metadata to be deposited by participating publishers as well as the preferred and mandatory metadata elements.
Issues of relevance to repositories are also addressed, including the proposal to unify the ingestion services either based on format used or protocols such as OAI-PMH or SWORD, as well as procedures for the provision of usage data.
An updated version of the draft report will be made available by PEER later this year.
PEER is supported by the EC eContentplus programme. Partners include the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), the European Science Foundation, Göttingen State and University Library, the Max Planck Society, INRIA, SURF Foundation and University of Bielefeld.
