“An exploratory assortment of ChatGPT responses to prompts related to open infrastructure for research and scholarship. Arranged by theme based on tags developed by the Open Access Tracking Project.”
“In 2022, our focus was on building OA.Report (a blog on that coming soon! Join our mailing list to be notified). But, as 2022 becomes 2023, we wanted to take the chance to celebrate the other work we did to help make Open Access easy & equitable. So, without further ado:
Our governance got an update as we joined Code for Science & Society (a US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit), and our new advisory committee got to work….
Our new transparency page helped the community learn more about our operations….
OA.Support, our new Open Access helpdesk, facilitated self-archiving through 430 follow-up emails, answering 100 questions and capturing dozens of researcher quotes for policy development. The Gates foundation is the first to deploy the service fully, and we’re both encouraged by these results….
At a United Nations library event, we launched a new collaboration with the Open Climate Campaign to help unlock climate change research….
We enhanced the cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool by providing new data on what type of Open Access a journal supports (e.g., Diamond, Transformative, Hybrid, Gold), as well as fast updates to ShareYourPaper Permissions data.
Our team met in-person for the first time to bond, scheme, and build!
We stopped using Google Analytics to protect our users’ privacy. A small step to align ourselves with our values.
We celebrated our first anniversary as OA.Works after our rebrand in 2021! We’ve been so pleased with the communities response….
RSCVD has now facilitated more than 22,000 requests for access by libraries impacted by COVID-19, with more than 14,000 fulfilled requests.
ShareYourPaper unpaywalled more than 350 articles!
We updated ShareYourPaper and InstantILL to improve their performance and maintainability and squash bugs.
We continued to learn! We attended conferences on user experience in Libraries, courses on Critical Management Studies & Critical Concepts in Library and Information Sciences, and mastered new systems like Cloudflare Workers.
We started helping run the Open Access Tracking Project mailing list to help the OA movement stay in the know –– just one of many times we tried to lend a hand to other valuable projects.”
“An exploratory assortment of ChatGPT responses to prompts related to open access to research and scholarship. Arranged by theme based on tags developed by the Open Access Tracking Project….”
“An exploratory assortment of ChatGPT responses to prompts related to open infrastructure for research and scholarship. Arranged by theme based on tags developed by the Open Access Tracking Project.”
Dissemination via Indieweb.Social (an instance of Mastodon) of the Open Infrastructure Tracking Project (OITP), maintained by Invest in Open Infrastructure. Much of OITP’s content comes from the Open Access Tracking Project. OITP runs on TagTeam software.
OITP can also be found on Twitter: https://twitter.com/oitp_ioi
“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….”
“IOI applies metadata– in the form of subject tags– to citations of published works collected in the Open Infrastructure Tracking Project (OITP) platform and in IOI’s group Zotero library.
We update our list of approved tags as needed, depending on IOI’s current strategic focus, stakeholder concerns, and industry trends.
Our tagging is modelled on that of the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP). We have adopted some of its tagging language and tag definitions (sometimes word for word). We remain very grateful to OATP for its generous example….”
“In a recent meta-study for the German Federal Ministry of Education and Science (abbreviated BMBF), TIB investigated the current state of research on the effects of Open Access. The report resulting from this study has also recently been published (“Wirkungen von Open Access”; https://doi.org/10.34657/7666), here in the blog I have summarised the results of the study. The study relied on the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) as a control instrument: Using the collection of Open Access references on OATP, we were able to systematically expand the literature on all of the impacts we examined and make sure that we did not overlook any significant studies. After completing the study, we supplemented OATP with the small amount of literature that had not been already recorded there. We use this opportunity to introduce this important resource for information on Open Access to the audience of the TIB blog.
The OATP is dedicated to collecting and making available all news and commentary on OA topics in one place. The platform was founded in 2009 by Peter Suber. Different from existing channels such as blogs, OATP was designed to provide a comprehensive collection of the growing number of contributions on OA topics via crowdsourcing. For this purpose, OATP relies on the open source software TagTeam, which was specially developed for OATP by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Using TagTeam, users can link items on OATP and tag them in order to categorize their contents: For example, oa.benefit refers to entries on the benefits of Open Access; the tag oa.germany identifies entries on Open Access in Germany….”
“Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers.[1] With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright….”
“The Open Scholarship Knowledge Base (OSKB) is a collaborative initiative to curate and share knowledge about the what, why, and how of open scholarship. This includes reviewing, organizing, and improving the discoverability of content to support the education and application of open practices for all aspects of the research lifecycle….”
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) – Tagging help by OABN
Background
The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP), is a crowd-sourced social tagging project that runs on open-source software. It harnesses the power of the community to capture news and comment on open access (OA) in every academic field and region of the world. We want to help expand its coverage of OA books — and you can help!
How
The OATP has two missions:
To create real-time alerts for OA-related developments, and
To organize knowledge of the field, by tag or subtopic, for easy searching and sharing.
The OATP publishes a large primary feed and hundreds of smaller secondary feeds – one of which (‘’oa.books’’) is a valuable resource for the OA book community. (It’s published alongside our blog posts, and provides valuable updates about developments and discussions related to OA books.)
There are two ways you can contribute to this feed.
1) Become a tagger yourself
If you are interested in tagging for the OATP, please have a look at this post, which explains the basics. Feel free to contact one of the OABN coordinators (info@oabooksnetwork.org) with any basic setup questions — all the coordinators have signed up, so they should be able to help you with any initial difficulties.
2) Ask the OABN
The OATP is a crowd-sourced project, depending on the ‘many eyeballs’ principle. The more contributors there are, from as many different backgrounds as possible, the better its coverage will be. However, lots of things might prevent you from becoming a tagger: for example, time constraints, a lack of technical expertise, or other restrictions.
The OABN coordinators would therefore be happy to tag online content related to open access books that is suggested by community members (to get a sense of the sorts of things that are currently tagged, see the OATP feed ‘’oa.books’’, which is published alongside our blog posts).
“This project has piloted and modeled new approaches to “mapping” or making more visible the people, organizations, tools, and services that constitute “scholarly communication” today. We took a multi-tiered approach, coming at this rather large ambition from multiple directions simultaneously. We conducted a census of scholarly communication providers that allowed us to dive deeply into the organizational models, fiscal structures, governance environments, and community engagement of more than 40 service providers, and we published a report summarizing our findings and recommendations as well as a blog post with more informal perspectives. We also created and published a massive bibliographic scan including information about 206 tools, services, and systems that are instrumental to the publishing and distribution of the scholarly record. We also conducted focus groups with library leaders and a survey of libraries to better understand what investments they made in scholarly communication infrastructure and services. …”
“OATP isn’t my main job by a long shot. But my main job requires me to stay on top of what’s happening in the world of OA, which is fortuitous for OATP. My approach is to read all that I can, for my job, and then share what I read or learn by tagging it for OATP….
Some taggers systematically search for new developments in areas that matter to them, such as OA in their country, OA in their field, or OA on a certain subtopic such as OA policies, OA journals, OA repositories, OA books, open data, OER, or copyright. Others simply tag what they encounter, without taking special pains to encounter more than they already do. I welcome both kinds. As they join the project, in enough fields and countries, bringing their different interests and perspectives with them, OATP becomes more and more inclusive….”
“Join us for a live Q&A session with Peter Suber and Milica Ševkuši? to find out more about the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)….”
A post from the Open Access Books Network about the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) and how it can be used by anyone interested in Open Access books. Includes details of a Q&A with Peter Suber and Milica Ševkuši? on Tuesday 20th October at 10am EDT / 3pm BST.