One of the most valuable aspects of PEER is that it is a collaboration of the key stakeholder groups involved in academic research and scholarly publishing: the library & repository communities, scholarly publishers and research communities including research funding bodies and researchers both as authors and readers.

Support for the participating stakeholders is provided via the PEER Helpdesk.

Within PEER, representatives from each of these key stakeholder groups are actively participating in the project on a variety of ways:

 

PEER Executive & consortium

 All key stakeholder groups are represented on the PEER Executive and the broader consortium. The Executive has the responsibility for steering the project in line with the agreed Description of Work which forms part of the grant agreement with the European Commission.

Content provision

 Publishers and researchers as authors will be providing content to the repositories for use in the PEER project, while both publishers and repositories will make content available to researchers as readers.

Repositories task force and participating repositories

 The repositories task force within PEER is responsible for identifying candidate repositories for participation and proposing standards, formats and processes for use within the project (and beyond) and for sharing project outcomes with the broader repository & library community.

Publisher group

 Publishers participating in PEER will meet periodically during the project to discuss the project and research results from the publisher perspective.

Research

 All three strands of research will be undertaken by highly regarded independent research teams selected via an open tendering process. Repositories and publishers will provide logfile data to the usage research team, to show trends in usage [by researchers as readers], while researchers will take part the behavioural research directly via questionnaires and focus groups. The economic research will draw on information from project participants and beyond.

Research Oversight Group

 The Research Oversight Group consists of three independent experts, each being a leading academic in the fields of scholarly publishing or economics. The group members will support PEER through advising on and validating the research specification, evaluating the research bids received, the quality of research undertaken and the subsequent research deliverables.

Advisory Board

 The Advisory Board consists of approximately 20 individuals representing all key stakeholder groups. The board will be invited to evaluate the research at various key points throughout the project and will play an important role in both providing PEER with the viewpoints of the stakeholder groups they represent, while also helping to disseminate important findings from the project within their respective communities.