Category Archives: oa.oatp

In the works at OA.Works in 2022

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“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.”

The gaping problem at the heart of scientific research – The Week

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“The benefits of open access have been proved beyond doubt….

National science agencies from nations including the UK, Australia, Italy, the United States and Brazil called for publishers to make coronavirus research immediately and freely accessible, which in the most part they did.

But the very need for these groups to call for research to be made available in the middle of a global emergency demonstrates the failure of the current publishing system. Making research immediately free to read, which, when combined with the use of an open publishing licence, is known as open access’ is a hot topic in science.

Global health bodies know how important open research is, especially in times of emergency, which is why they have repeatedly called for research to be made open….

The consequences of lack of access to research can be dire.

In 2015 a group of African researchers claimed that an earlier Ebola outbreak could have been prevented if research on it had been published openly….

As 2023 unfolds, it seems that the benefits of open access have been proved beyond doubt.

The next emergency in front of us, climate change, is much more complex, and there too are calls for open access.

Serious investment in a variety of approaches is essential to ensure a diverse, equitable, open access future.”

Readings for Open Access Week 2022 · Peter Suber | October 2022

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“Open Access Week 2022 is coming up, October 24-30. This year’s theme is Open for Climate Justice. I hope you’ll find good moments to talk with colleagues about OA. To me, that’s the main purpose of OA Week. If you can’t talk every week with colleagues about OA, then use OA Week as an excuse. Before the pandemic, you could talk from a stage, your office, their office, a hallway, sidewalk, or café table. Now use Zoom or your favorite Zoom alternative. The effectiveness matters more than the setting, and informal personal settings are almost always more effective than formal impersonal ones. Make the case in a way that your colleagues will understand, which you understand because you’re their colleague. Lead with direct conversation, not readings. Take advantage of the give and take of conversation. Show that you can answer your colleagues’ actual concerns. Show that you can answer the frequently heard questions, objections, and misunderstandings that might come up along the way. Help your colleagues understand that there’s a serious problem and a beautiful solution….”

Keeping up with Open Access – News – Illinois State

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“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….”

The Open Access Tracking Project – OATP – TIB-Blog

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“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 Tracking Project (OATP) – Tagging help by OABN – Open Access Books Network Blog

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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).

 

Peter Suber on Open Access News | Archivalia

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“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….”

What is the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)? – Open Access Books Network Blog

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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.

OSFair – open-access-tracking-project-the-most-comprehensive-tool-to-stay-up-to-date-with-the-most-recent-open-access-developments

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“The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) is a crowd-sourced project, aiming to provide a comprehensive Open Science (OS) feed, covering all OS subtopics, in all academic fields and regions of the world and in all languages. 

The project aims to tag new OS developments and disseminates this information to the end user in eight different types of feeds: 1) HTML, 2) RSS feed, 3) Atom, 4) JSONP, 5) Email, 6) Twitter, 7) PushBullet, and 8) Reddit. The OATP is the most comprehensive and easy to use tool where the whole OS community can contribute with tagging and capturing the open scholarly communications developments in open access, funders’ policies, copyright and open licenses, open data, research data management, and open tools and infrastructures, etc. 

Currently 80 taggers have tagged more than 77000 items in the OATP offering a comprehensive list of news items with self-sufficient summaries from experts, occasional comments, links to relevant developments and a searchable archive. Each tagged item offers also record metadata information, such as the date of the tag and the name of the tagger, while the tagged items range from blog posts, discussion forums, newspaper articles, open access books, journal articles, YouTube videos and many more. 

The OATP though is not merely an alert service, but also a classification system; it enables users to classify OS developments even when they are not new. The two most important facts about these “subtopic tags” is that they are all optional and they are all user-defined, which helps users track new items on the subtopics they care about. 

The OATP calls the OS community to become an OATP tagger by capturing OS related information that takes place in their own fields, countries and languages. …”

Finding Open Access Articles – Tools & Tips – LITA Blog

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“You know you have access and you have access now. However, the discovery process for open access articles isn’t necessarily the same as subscription searching. Especially if you do not have access to specific subscription databases.

This guide is meant to help individuals, of any background, search more easily for open access articles….”

History of open access – Peter Suber

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“Analogy. Suppose a small town began to grow in a former wilderness. Early in its history it had a newspaper. In time it had a phone book, tax roll, town hall, post office, telegraph office, public library, school, church, cemetery, train station, doctor, surveyor, bartender, and private eye, each accumulating records in its own idiosyncratic, incomplete way. None of these caches of information is a history of the town. All are useful for studying the history of the town. Someone who knew where a good fraction of them were located would do a service by pointing them out. In this sense, I [Peter Suber] haven’t written a history of OA. But I’ve created materials, alone or with others, useful for studying the history of OA. And here I’m pointing them out, with some notes on their scope, preservation, and searchability. Needless to say, the history of OA is still unfolding. The small town didn’t disappear except in the sense that it grew into a large city….”

Want to Support Open Access? Volunteer for the Open Access Tracking Project

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“The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) provides a constant stream of up-to-date information about open access issues in a primary feed and in a number of secondary feeds that focus on specialized OA subtopics. It offers the primary feed in a variety of distribution options, including email, Google+, HTML, RSS, Twitter, and others. It is an invaluable source of information for open access advocates, research data specialists, and scholarly communication specialists, and it provides important support for the open access movement as a whole.

Based at the Harvard Open Access Project, the OATP was launched by Peter Suber. Suber’s SPARC Open Access Newsletter and his Free Online Scholarship Newsletter played an important part in getting the open access movement off the ground. The OATP continues the mission of those groundbreaking publications using the open source TagTeam software, which was developed for the OATP.

Launched with the help of grant funding, the OATP will enter a new an all-volunteer phase at the end of August 2018. To continue this crowd-sourced project, new volunteers are needed. You can help move the OA agenda forward by being one of them. This wiki page explains how you can join the team and start tagging.

By volunteering just a bit of time to the OATP, you can make a significant difference.”

Should OATP create a Facebook feed?

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“The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) publishes a daily feed of news about open access (OA). The feed is available in eight file formats to suit people with different needs or preferences: Atom, Email, Google+, HTML, JSON, Pushbullet, RSS, and Twitter.

https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/OATP_feeds#Versions_of_the_primary_project_feed

But OATP doesn’t have a Facebook feed. This is deliberate. I think Facebook deceives and exploits its users. I don’t want to encourage its use. On the other hand, I want OATP to reach everyone who cares about OA. It might miss a lot of OA people by refusing to create a Facebook feed….

Should OATP create a Facebook feed? Would any of you subscribe? Would any of you prefer it to the formats we already offer? ….”