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]