Press release
29 May 2012
Brussels

STM welcomes support for gold open access from PEER conference
 


‘Gold’ open access publication is the practical route to achieving sustainable open access, the project partners agreed today at the PEER End of Project results conference in Brussels. The Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project, which will report to the European Commission in July 2012, provides large-scale, robust research to inform the debate about access to publicly funded research.
 


The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) welcomes the consensus of the partners, and hails PEER as a successful collaboration.
 


Behavioural, economics and usage research were presented at the conference today. “The PEER project shows that self-archiving is complex, inefficient and cannot be successfully achieved without the co-operation of publishers,” said Michael Mabe, CEO of STM.  Only 170 of the c 11,800 authors invited to self-archive, chose to do so.  Usage research supports the hypothesis that readers prefer the publishers’ final version over self-archived manuscripts.
 


“Through working together on PEER, publishers, funders and the repository community have established greater trust and understanding,” said Mabe. “Today has demonstrated that there are a number of fundamentals on which all PEER partners are agreed, based on the results and experience of the project. Most strikingly, all partners are in agreement that ‘gold’ open access publication provides a practical, viable way to provide public access to research findings.”
 


PEER, supported by the EC eContentplus programme, is a collaboration between publishers, repositories, and the research community. The project was a partnership between STM, Fondation Européenne de la Science Association (ESF), Göttingen State and University Library (UGOE), Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V. (MPG), Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA).
 


The project, which has run since September 2008, has been investigating the effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts on reader access, author visibility, and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research, with the aim of informing the evolution of policies in this area.
 

-ENDS –

STM is an international association of over 100 scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishers, collectively responsible for more than 60% of the global annual output of research articles, 55% of the active research journals and the publication of tens of thousands of print and electronic books, reference works and databases. We are the only international trade association equally representing all types of STM publishers - large and small companies, not for profit organizations, learned societies, traditional, primary, secondary publishers and new entrants to global publishing. http://www.stm-assoc.org

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