Exploring the impact of article archiving

Julia Wallace, plenary 4 (repository reality)

The PEER project is a collaboration between all stakeholder groups in scientific education, investigating the impact of large-scale systematic article archiving. Its participating publishers include the large publishers, university presses, society publishers - between them contributing 241 journals, including top, middle and lower tier journals across four broad subject areas. Participating repositories are similarly broad. Articles were either deposited by publishers or self-archived by authors; publishers provided metadata for all their articles, whether or not they deposited the full text. Authors were invited to self-deposit via a project-specific interface. Over 53,000 manuscripts were submitted by publishers. 11,000 authors were invited to self-archive; 170 did so.

Challenges on the publishing side:

• Publisher workflows - extracting manuscripts at an unusual point in the workflow required changes
• File formats and metadata schemas varied and required normalisation
• Journals contained many different types of content
• Some metadata didn't exist at early stages of the workflow eg DOI (some publishers updated metadata after initial deposit)
• Some repositories wanted additional metadata beyond core elements

Challenges on the repository side:

• Varying metadata requirements and ingestion processes
• Struggled with embargo management
• Author authentication
• Log file provision

Ongoing research:

Independent from the executive members, to avoid bias - managed by a Research Oversight Group. Author questionnaires, usage analysis, interviews. Behavioural research looked at the behaviour of authors and users, exploring perceptions of green open access and expectations / concerns around repositories:

• Only a minority of researchers associated repositories with self-archiving
• Preference for final version
• Authors don't see self-archiving as their responsibility

Costs

The research has also explored processes and costs - eg salary cost of peer review is $250 per article plus overheads. No economies of scale. Production costs of up to $470 per article. Platform set-up and maintenance costs range from $170k to $400k [interesting data!]. Challenges of competing with established publisher platforms.

Main outputs from research: preliminary indicators show 5% migration from publisher platforms to repositories. Continuing to explore accuracy of that across the board, and trends. Registration is free and open for a review meeting in Brussels at the end of May.