Europe: Final Report: Authors and Users vis-a-vis Journals and Repositories

The final report was made available online by PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research).

From the PEER Web Site:

The PEER Behavioural Research Team from Loughborough University (Department of Information Science & LISU) has completed the behavioural research commissioned by PEER. The research which consisted of two phases adopted a mixed methods approach consisting of surveys, focus groups and an interdisciplinary workshop and was carried out between April 2009 and August 2011. The Final report provides the results of both phases of research and a synthesis of the findings of the baseline study.

From the Report:

The Behavioural research: Authors and users vis-a-vis journals and repositories project was commissioned by PEER in April 2009 as part of a broader initiative to investigate the effects of the large-scale, systematic deposit of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts (also called stage-two research outputs) on reader access, author visibility, and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research. The specific aim of the behavioural research was to understand the extent to which authors and users are aware of Open Access (OA), the different ways of achieving it, and the (de)motivating factors that influence its uptake.