From: Michael Mabe <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 31 May 2012 09:06:54 +0200

As Chair of the PEER Project Partner Consortium I must remind David
that the caveats made about the usage results don't allow him to
characterise them as he has in his post. The usage researcher Dr Ian
Rowlands was explicit at the beginning of his presentation about what
the usage results DID NOT show and asked all commenting to respect
that in any tweets or blog comments. Explicitly in the six month usage
report that will be released in a couple of weeks, the CIBER group
say:

"It is important in any communication regarding PEER usage findings to
be clear about the specific aims (and limitations) of the experimental
design.  The specific aim is to model the impacts, if any, of the
large-scale deposit of EU-27 authored materials.  It is not an
experiment with wider ambitions to model the impact of Green open
access more generally."

In addition (a point also made by Paul Ayris of LIBER in the closing
roundtable of the meeting), while a modest increase in downloads at
publisher sites was observed, the reasons for it are not clear. Ian
posited a number of possibilities: artefacts of the experimental set
up such as high quality PEER metadata, the presence of a clickable DOI
on the repository version, and the complex nature of usage paths on
the internet.

Although the nature of the sample set (19,000 embargo expired European
papers only from 241 journals in the PEER Observatory) and the limited
time the Observatory was available for usage research before the
project had to conclude (just over a year) mean that the usage
research cannot be used to make conclusions about a full oa green
universe, this is not the case for results from the other research
teams or practical conclusions from the huge and complex
infrastructure it required.

The difficulties involved in creating an infrastructure for the
European papers alone and the manual inventions to clean-up author
accepted manuscripts just for this limited set (around 40% of the full
set), would just get more unwieldy for dealing with all the content
and 25,000 rather than just 241 journals (as the full green oa
scenario would require).

Given all this it is reasonable to conclude at the level of
practicality, user acceptance and utility of outcome, that a Green
approach seems much less attractive than a Gold pay-to publish one:
Gold creates no risks for the journal model, it allows scholars and
the general public to have the final versions they really want upon
publication, it involves no additional infrastructure developments
(such as PEER had to create with its Depot) or assuming (unlikely)
publisher and repository collaboration, and would free up money and
staff at the repositories to concentrate on the research data
archiving problem.

All the slides from the conference will be posted at the PEER project
site later today and the full research reports after the final review
meeting with the EC

Best, Michael

Michael A Mabe
Chief Executive Officer
International Association of STM Publishers
Prama House, 267 Banbury Road
OXFORD, OX2 7HT, UK

Mobile: +44 7717 343083
Phone:  +44 1865 339321
Direct:   +44 1865 339324
Fax:      +44 1865 339325
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Web:   www.stm-assoc.org

***************

From: David Prosser <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 21:01:53 +0100

Interestingly, we heard today at a conference in Brussels on the PEER
project that the project found:

1. No evidence of any harm to publishers as a result of embargoed
green OA 2. Evidence of increased total usage through green OA 3.
Evidence that green OA through the PEER project actually drives usage
at the publisher site.

The PEER project did not investigate issues around gold OA and so I am
a little surprised that this is the focus of the press release from
STM.

David



On 29 May 2012, at 19:52, LIBLICENSE wrote:

> From: Kim Beadle <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 16:59:25 +0200
>
> PEER End of Project Conference
> 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. www.stm-assoc.org
>
> Contact Kim Beadle for more information - [log in to unmask]