PEER – Publishing and the Ecology of European Research
News release

25 August 2009

PEER announces the appointment of teams from Loughborough University and University 
College London (UCL) for Behavioural and Usage Research. 

Behavioural Research: Authors and Readers vis-à-vis Journals and Repositories

The behavioural research will be undertaken by the Department of Information Science and 
LISU at Loughborough University and has the following objectives:

•	Track trends and explain patterns of author and user behaviour in the context of so 
called Green Open Access.
•	Understand the role repositories play for authors in the context of journal publishing. 
•	Understand the role repositories play for users in context of accessing journal articles.

A baseline report is due in autumn 2009 and will be made available on the PEER website. 

Usage Research: Journals and Repositories 

The usage research will be undertaken by the UCL based CIBER group, with the following 
objectives:

•	Determine usage trends at publishers and repositories;
•	Understand source and nature of use of deposited manuscripts in repositories;
•	Track trends, develop indicators and explain patterns of usage for repositories and 
journals.

The research teams were selected by the PEER Executive following an open tendering 
process and assessment by the members of the PEER Research Oversight Group. 

Both research teams will provide final reports mid 2011 and will feed into model 
development to determine whether (and how) traditional publishing systems can co-exist 
with self-archiving. 

Michael Mabe, CEO of STM which acts as Coordinator for PEER stated ‘The research 
outcomes from PEER will provide valuable input to informed dialogue and decisions in the 
open access debate. The successful teams were selected from a range of exceptional 
candidates and we hope to see the same levels of quality and interest when the invitation is 
announced for the forthcoming Economics research tender.’

About PEER:
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.

Further information on PEER, visit the wbsite: www.peerproject.eu 
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
Long-term preservation service: Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Nationale bibliotheek van 
Nederland)

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