News release

4 June 2009


PEER – Guidelines for publishers and repository managers on deposit, assisted deposit and 
self-archiving now available at http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/

PEER is a pioneering collaboration between publishers, repositories and the research 
community, which aims to investigate the effects of the large-scale deposit (so called 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.

Guidelines documenting the procedures for publisher deposit and for subsequent transfer to 
participating PEER repositories are presented in this document following extensive 
consul¬tation with both target groups within PEER. 

An author helpdesk for the project is being established and will shortly be made available via 
the PEER website. This will serve as the major information point for EU based authors of 
articles in participating PEER journals who wish to self-archive their accepted manuscripts 
after receiving an invitation to do so.

The report sets out a major advance in repository practice in the use of the SWORD protocol 
which allows application-level deposit of material into repositories. It is presented as a 
cohesive sub-report (Appendix B), and it is expected that this may become a ready 
reference tool in its own right. 

The Guidelines set out in this document should be read in conjunction with ‘D2.1 Draft report 
on the provision of usage data and manuscript procedures for publishers and repository 
managers’ also available at http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/. 

For enquiries relating to PEER, please e-mail: [log in to unmask]

PEER is supported by the EC eContentplus programme.



PEER Partners: 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

STM publishers participating in PEER: BMJ Publishing Group; Cambridge University Press; 
Elsevier; IOP Publishing; Nature Publishing Group; Oxford University Press; Portland Press; 
Sage Publications; Springer; Taylor & Francis Group; Wiley-Blackwell

PEER repositories: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V. (MPG); 
HAL, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA); Göttingen 
State and University Library (UGOE); BiPrints, Universität Bielefeld (UNIBI); Kaunas 
University of Technology, Lithuania; University Library of Debrecen, Hungary

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