“As the fall semester begins and we welcome our students and faculty back to classes, we hope you’re excited about scholarly communications and Open Access too. Exciting projects to make scholarship and creative output more accessible for users seem to be announced every day, and it can become difficult to keep track of everything going on in the Open Access world. To help our readers, we’re offering three resources which can be used to track developments and projects that may be of interest.
The first resource is the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP). The OATP is crowd-sourced project that seeks “(1) to create real-time alerts for OA-related news and comment, and (2) to organize knowledge of the field, by tag or subtopic, for easy searching and sharing.” The project maintains a variety of feeds, from the general, comprehensive feed for all Open Access topics and news to feeds related to individual or specific topics or projects. The feed can be followed through an RSS reader, or it has a Twitter account.
The OATP is a part of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP), which can be a valuable resource itself. Although it is no longer grant funded, the project is still active and does free consultations and maintains a webpage of useful resources. These resources cover a variety of topics, including best practices for universities drafting OA policies, books about OA and making work OA, and reference pages on federal legislation.
Finally it may come as no surprise that social media can be a place to learn about OA projects and developments, although the sheer number of results can be daunting and the source should always be considered when reading an announcement. The Open Access Directory maintains a list of social media sites about OA. The list includes links to groups and feeds on major social media platforms and in a variety of languages….”
