OATP Phase 2: Difference between revisions

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= What could happen? =  
= What could happen? =  


* OATP could decline in quantity and quality (comprehensiveness and relevance). Or OATP could improve in both respects. It all depends on how good volunteers we can recruit to tag.  
* OATP could decline in quantity and quality<!-- (comprehensiveness and relevance) -->. Or OATP could improve in both respects. It all depends on how many good volunteers we can recruit to tag.
 
* Hence I appeal to you: Please tag for OATP and please help us recruit others to tag for OATP.


= Please join us as a tagger, and help recruit others to join us! =
= Please join us as a tagger, and help recruit others to join us! =

Revision as of 15:10, 21 June 2018

Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) » Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » OATP Phase 2

Since the transition to the new phase of the Open Access Tracking Project is the result of my circumstances and decisions, I feel that I must sometimes use the first-person pronoun in explaining the new phase and its background. — Peter Suber.

What's the new phase?

  • OATP is entering the phase in which it has no direct grant funding.
    • When I launched OATP in 2009, it had grant funding from the Wellcome Trust (2007-2009).
    • In 2011, OATP became part of the Harvard Open Access Project, which had grant funding from Arcadia (2011-2016) and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (2016-2018).
    • The new phase is the post-grant phase.
  • OATP was always crowd-sourced. But it previously had a mix of grant-funded and volunteer taggers. Hence, the change isn't precisely that OATP is becoming crowd-sourced. It's becoming all-volunteer. I myself will continue to participate as a volunteer.

What could happen?

  • OATP could decline in quantity and quality. Or OATP could improve in both respects. It all depends on how many good volunteers we can recruit to tag.
  • Hence I appeal to you: Please tag for OATP and please help us recruit others to tag for OATP.

Please join us as a tagger, and help recruit others to join us!

Why not continue grant funding?

  • For about a decade, I had two part-time jobs, one of which was to run the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP), which included OATP. But in practice that meant I had two full-time jobs. I needed to retreat to one full-time job.
  • I'm confident that if I had applied for new funding I had a good chance to receive it. The problem is that I had personal reasons not to try.
  • Moreover, OATP was always intended to be an all-volunteer, crowd-sourced project. The early grant-funded years were an incubation period in which we could refine the project and the develop the underlying software, TagTeam.
  • Finally, if others want to seek funding for work on OATP, they're free to do so, and I'd be very happy to work with you on any details.

Why not make the transition earlier?

  • When I launched OATP, it initially ran on an open-source tagging platform called Connotea. But Connotea was losing development support, and we were realizing that in any case OATP needed features not offered by Connotea or any existing tagging platform. That's why we decided to develop our own tagging platform, TagTeam. (For complicated reasons, we didn't use any of the Connotea code.) OATP started running in TagTeam as early as 2012. But it needed more development time before it was ready for recruiting a large number of new users — recruiting the crowd. It became ready in the spring of 2018.

The future of OATP

  • We're not laying OATP down. It will continue as an all-volunteer project. I will continue to work on it as well, without funding.