The Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) has announced that the PEER Behavioural Research Team from Loughborough University has completed its behavioural baseline report on authors and users vis-à-vis journals and repositories. The report, now available at http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/, is based on an electronic survey of authors (and authors as users) with more than 3,000 European researchers and a series of focus groups. These cover the medical sciences; social sciences, humanities & arts; life sciences; and physical sciences & mathematics. PEER is a collaboration between publishers, repositories and the research community.
The baseline report outlines findings from the first phase of the research and identifies the key themes to emerge. It also identifies priorities for further analysis and future work. According to the report, an individual’s attitude towards open access repositories may change dependent on whether they are an author or a reader - readers being interested in the quality of the articles but authors also focused on the reputation of the repository itself. Reaching the target audience is the overwhelming motivation for scholars to disseminate their research results and this strongly influences their choice of journal and/or repository.
The report further states that researchers in certain disciplines may lack confidence in making preprints available. To some extent this is not only a matter of confidence in the quality of a text but also due to differences in work organisation across research cultures (e.g. strong internal peer review of manuscripts versus reliance on journals for peer review). Other factors are likely to include career stage and centrality of research to the parent discipline. Value-added services, such as download statistics and alert services, would contribute to the perceived usefulness of repositories and could help them gain popularity in what is an increasingly competitive information landscape. Readers often need to go through a variety of processes to access all the articles that they require and widespread open access may reduce the need for this time consuming practice, the report notes.
The full report is available from http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/
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