presented by Andrew Dorward, at the PEER Conference, 29 May 2012, Brussels, Belgium.

1. PEER Conference
29th May, 2012
Andrew Dorward

2. Project overview
• Large-scale EC-funded project (€4.2 million, 3 year, 9 months) to model impact
of Green OA on STM publishers
• 5 main consortium members: STM, ESF, Uni Göttingen, Max Planck Group,
INRIA) plus input from SURF, Uni Bielefeld plus Advisory Board
• Involved 12 STM publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, IoP, OUP, Sage, BMJ,
CUP, NPG, T&F et al); 6 repositories (mix of IRs – TCD, Uni Göttingen; national
repositories – INRIA, KBN; subject repositories – MPG – no UK IRs involved.
• 53,000 pre-prints (ie Author Final Copy peer –reviewed) from 241 journals
(tertiles 1,2,3, >40% EU-sourced content) placed in repositories and publisher
websites and downloads measured
• Uni Göttingen/INRIA -developed DRIVER tools – PEER Depot, PEER
Observatory – used for large-scale publisher deposit, and infrastructure created
• Appears to demonstrate that IRs and publisher sites can happily co-exist for
Green OA
• Health warnings:
• Driven by STM, so may erect further barriers to Green OA (Peter Suber)
• Only provides a snapshot over a very limited time period with many
variables, so should not be taken as conclusive proof – needs longer study
(CIBER, Paul Ayris, UCL)
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3. The Publisher’s View (STM, MPG)
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4. Implications for RepNet
• Like RepNet, PEER started out as Green-OA focussed, but overwhelming
opinion from PEER study is that future direction will follow Gold route
• Consensus from PEER is that Green will exist as hybrid to cover switch in
business processes to gold model
• The PEER Depot and Observatory infrastructure will support both green and
Gold OA – next stage would be to build a financial infrastructure to support the
business model (Uni Bocconi)
• For the RepNet project to be relevant in 12 months, we must develop an
infrastructure and processes to support both Green and Gold OA models
• What we need to do:
• Create a new WP to model and support a Gold OA infrastructure
• Build on excellent work done by Uni Bocconi (Milan) to model cost drivers
for publishers and repositories to work on requirements of funders
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5. The Repository View (MPG)
• 11,400 invitations from publishers to authors to deposit pre-prints in IRs resulted
in only 170 deposits – why?
• OA IRs are no threat to publishers, results show IR deposit complements
publisher downloads, BUT IRs “not key to optional scholarly information delivery
systems” (MPG) – why?
• Repositories should “concentrate on research data archiving and curation which
is essential” (STM) – why?
• The PEER Depot is essential as a ‘clearing house’ for complex, unstructured
content and as a ‘dark archive’ – a feature of Green OA of pre-prints
• What does this mean for RepNet?
• Self-archiving will not drive Green OA as we want
• Clear STM agenda for publishers to control content delivery, not IRs –
should we support this?
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6. The Infrastructure View (INRIA)
• PEER Depot and PEER Observatory based on DRIVER tools produced by
SURF and Uni Göttingen
• PEER and DRIVER: PEER populates DRIVER repositories and DRIVER
facilitates access for the user community – Uni Göttingen co-ordinates
• Infrastructure now stable, proven and can be used to support Gold OA with add-
ons to support financial and business processes
• Immense technical/organisational problems around: formats (TEK, LATEK, etc);
publisher processes; publisher metadata (NLM 2.0, 3.0, Scholar 1); metadata
interchange standard (TEI); deposit (SWORD/SONEX); extracting metadata
from PDF (Grobid) – caused project to overrun by 9 months and consequent 3-
month ‘snapshot’ of download behaviour from publishers and repositories
• The PEER Depot functions – metadata consolidation and curation; embargo and
withdrawal procedures; dark archive
• PEER Observatory functions – workflow, filtering
• What does this mean for RepNet?
• RJ-Broker is vital component
• Keep open mind on Open Depot
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