International Association of Science, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM)

is an international association of about 100 scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishers, collectively responsible for more than 60% of the global annual output of research articles. The mission of STM is to create a platform for exchanging ideas and information and to represent the interest of the STM publishing community in the fields of copyright, technology developments, and end user/library relations. It is the only international trade association equally representing all types of STM publishers - large and small companies, not-for-profit organisations, learned societies, traditional primary and secondary publishers and new entrants to global publishing.

Role in PEER: STM as coordinator will take a leadership role for the success of the project and the collaboration between the partners representing the publishing, library and research communities. STM will also interface with the publishers providing the journal content for the project, keeping them engaged and informed, and ensuring that they participate with other stakeholders in debates about issues and future scenarios raised by the project.

 

European Science Foundation (ESF)

is an association of 78 research organisations in 30 European countries. Its members are major research funding agencies, research performing organisations and learned societies who created ESF in 1975 to foster collaboration between researchers and between research organizations Europe.  ESF produces authoritative strategies and visions in all research fields, develops and manages funding schemes on behalf of its member organisations and facilitates consultative processes to allow its member organizations to develop common or compatible policies and operational procedures when dealing with issues of common concerns.

Role in PEER: ESF participates in the project on behalf of research organisations (research funding organisations and research performing organisations) and the research community. It will facilitate a dialogue between those groups with a view to finding a common position on key issues relevant to the project. ESF will consult with and act as interface for those organisations and the project.

 

Göttingen State and University Library (SUB)

is one of the largest libraries in Germany and a leader in the development of digital libraries.  It plays a key role in the EC-funded DRIVER project that is building the digital repository infrastructure for Europe.  SUB is one of the leading open access institutions and is very engaged in open access discussions.  Its expertise includes usage statistics, reference linking, citation analysis etc.  SUB also hosts the secretary of DINI (German Initiative for Networked Information).  It has collaborated with the other group members to develop the DINI guidelines, "Certificate Document and Publication Repositories" and "Electronic Publishing in Higher Education".

Role in PEER: Göttingen is the strategic coordinator for the library/repository community and act as communicator vice/versa to and from other institutions into the project. Its key role would be to coordinate the work of the PEER and DRIVER projects and plan a framework for interfacing the publishers and repositories within PEER.  This will have benefits for both projects, with PEER populating DRIVER repositories and DRIVER facilitating access for the user community.

 

Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL)

is a new central service unit established by Max Planck Society early in 2007. The MPDL coordinates the web-based management and supply of scientific information for the research of the Max Planck Society as a whole. This includes not only the operation of the electronic infrastructure, but also the development of new components necessary to tie individual Max Planck institutes into the global scientific communications network.

The Central Information Service for the institutes of the Chemistry Physics Technology division of the Max Planck Society (IVS-CPT) is located at the site for Solid State Research in Stuttgart but is available for all scientists within the Society. The unit provides a range of services, including complex searches that are beyond typical end users, and searches using specialist external databases not available to end users.  Citation analysis and research evaluation using citation data have become important activities, supplemented by bibliometric research.

Role in PEER: The role of the Max Planck Society will be two-fold:

• It will provide an immediate entry point to a national group of publication archives covering the 78 institutes of the MPS, where specific disciplinary or generic observations could be realised. The Max Planck Digital Library will both provide editorial support (metadata enrichment and/or adaptation) and technical development to facilitate the easy upload of publications on the eDoc and eSciDoc archives (the two main national archives of the MPG).
• It will contribute, through its IVS group, to the definition of the research studies, providing expertise on methodology and suggesting possible metrics and bibliographical measures to be applied during the course of the project. The MPS will also see how the concept of observatory within the project can be made sustainable by involving forces within the MPDL and the IVS group.

 

INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique) 

is a world-class research institute in computer science and control operating under the dual authority of the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Industry. It is dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information and communication science and technology (ICST). The Institute also plays a major role in technology transfer by fostering training through research, diffusion of scientific and technical information, development, as well as providing expert advice and participating in international programs. INRIA now has more than three years experience in open access repositories through a strong partnership with CCSD-CNRS (Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe).

Role in PEER: The role of INRIA is to facilitate a connection between the PEER project and the French national archive HAL, which, following a national agreement signed in September 2006, is now the central repository infrastructure for the universities and the main research institutions in France (CNRS, INRIA, INRA, INSERM, CEA, etc). Through an agreement with CNRS, INRIA has been involved in technical developments and will contribute to the interface of the national archive and editors, thus providing a platform immediately operational from the start of the project.

 

Stichting SURF

is the collaborative organisation for higher education institutions and research institutes aimed at breakthrough innovations in ICT. SURF provides the foundation for the excellence of higher education and research in the Netherlands. SURF collaborates with a number of partners abroad to share knowledge and to profit from advantages of scale. The results that SURF achieves are also guiding examples in an international setting. SURF foundation is the initiator for innovation in higher education and research. SURF initiates, guides and stimulates ICT innovation through sharing knowledge and partnerships.

SURF has coordinated the DARE programme, which resulted in DAREnet, a network linking the institutional repositories set up at all Dutch universities and various related institutions. DAREnet (now part of the science portal NARCIS) offers a single access point to the local digital collections.

DAREnet’s success has inspired the European network of repositories, DRIVER (Digital Repositoriey Infrastructure Vision for European Research). SURF plays a key role in this European project.

In the new programme SURFshare, SURF intends to make accessible not only the final publications but also the underlying datasets and intermediate results, such as visualisations or algorithms.

Role in PEER: SURF will play a key role in development of Guidelines for set up of open access repositories and deposit content in the institutional repositories. The Guidelines form the basis of harvesting mechanisms in synergy between PEER and DRIVER projects. This will have benefits for both projects, with PEER populating DRIVER repositories and DRIVER facilitating access for the user community. SURF also supports the helpdesk function to establish a workflow for repository ingest.

 

Bielefeld University Library

has contributed significantly to shape the German landscape of digital research libraries and electronic information and is heavily involved in international initiatives for research infrastructures for processing digital information. According to the German university ranking CHE Bielefeld University Library performs top-notch (Rank 2) on a national scale. The physical research library with its over 2,000,000 titles is renown for its highly integrated as well as open architectural and functional design. The developments of digital libraries can be traced back to the 80s and led, among other things, to the Digital Library North-Rhine-Westphalia "DigiBib", today hosted by the academic library centre "hbz" in Cologne for nearly 200 libraries. 

Recent projects in the domain of information infrastructures focus specifically on aggregating and networking high numbers of open document repositories that collect and expose scientific texts at the institutional level in order to provide open access to large corpora and, thus, to support novel forms of information provision in research. The search engine BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), for example, aggregates distributed Repositories, by providing access to about 12.000.000 publications from more than 820 international sources (June 2008). For open academic contents, BASE belongs not only to the most renown search engines (indicated by a high number of searches) but also shows an advanced quality in data aggregation and improved technical performance as compared to similar service providers. As another example, DRIVER  is a European Initiative providing an organisational umbrella for distributed repositories but also a technical interoperability framework for connecting arbitrary services. On the one hand a joint information space is offered, which can be used by multiple service providers. On the other hand an architecture allowing the synergetic operation of parallel and distributed services is deployed and offered for reuse.

Role in PEER: Bielefeld University will provide the technical interfaces to DRIVER and to repository networks and aggregations. UniBi is a full technical partner in DRIVER and DRIVER-II and specializes on on the aggregation aspect of distributed document repositories. Through these extertise and the 5 year experiences of operating the scientific search engine BASE that predominantly building on repository contents, UniBi will facilitate the implementation of the required repository interfaces for the PEER project.