The End of the Open Access Tracking Project
Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) » Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » The End of OATP
Some background
- I launched the Open Access Tracking Project in April 2009 and ran it until I laid it down in September 2026.
- OATP was a crowdsourced project to share news and comment about open access, broadly construed, in all academic fields, all countries, and all languages. It published feeds of real-time alerts about OA-related developments, and organized knowledge of the field by tag for easy searching and sharing. It even had an ISSN (2578-7020). Also see our Overview and FAQ.
- In practice, OATP covered more than OA. It also covered open science, open data, open education, open peer review, scholarly communication in general — and at least within the world of research — open licenses, open-source software, open standards, and open infrastructure. It was the most comprehensive source of news and comment on these topics for the 17+ years of its existence, and its dataset will be useful to anyone studying their history.
- I launched it primarily to replace my high-volume blog, Open Access News (2002-2010), because we needed a crowdsourced project to scale with the growth of OA.
- Starting in 2012, OATP ran on the Harvard instance of TagTeam, open-source software I developed specifically to meet the needs of OATP. Between 2009 and 2012, it ran on Connotea.
- In 2023, I started looking for ways to transfer OATP and TagTeam to nonprofit organizations, to ensure their long-term survival and further development. After several years of public and private effort, I found a handful of nonprofits willing to take part in a coalition, but couldn't find any willing to take the lead or give staff. With reluctance, I decided that I had to lay down OATP and TagTeam.
- OATP and TagTeam were key parts of the Harvard Open Access Project, my primary work at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. They were funded by grants from Arcadia (2011-2016) and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (2016-2018). After 2018, OATP and TagTeam remained active but unfunded projects at the Center. I'm glad to use this opportunity to repeat my thanks to Berkman Klein Center, Arcadia, and the Arnold Foundation.
The end of OATP
- September 30, 2026, was the last day of OATP.
- Over the life of the project, we had 121 active taggers.
- We tagged 111,411 items, which comes to 17.4 per day for 17+ years.
- Of those items, 93,909 were new (within the last six months) at the time of tagging, and 17,232 were older items tagged retroactively.
- To the best of my knowledge, we tagged every day, including weekends and holidays, with the sole exception of days when TagTeam was down for maintenance.
- We had 343 project-approved tags and more than 10,000 attested tags.
- We will lay down the Harvard instance TagTeam at a future date, still to be determined. Of course the TagTeam code is open, and anyone may upgrade it and host their own instances elsewhere.
The OATP data
- We are exporting the OATP dataset from TagTeam to a CSV file, and will put copies in more than one place for open access, use, and preservation outside TagTeam.
- The dataset will be in the public domain under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication. When OATP was active, we used CC0 to put the data in the public domain, as it was generated. See the Harvard TagTeam Terms of Service, §6.6.
The future
- I will continue to post OA-related news and comment to social media, primarily on Mastodon and Bluesky. But this will be individual, idiosyncratic, and time-limited posting, nothing like the systematic, crowdsourced operation of OATP.
- I have no plans to write a retrospective essay on OATP. But I've started writing up some Tagging Principles that I learned from running OATP. It's still a work-in-progress and I welcome comments.
- I will update this page when I have more news to share, such as links to copies of the OATP dataset and the end-date for the Harvard instance of TagTeam.
October 1, 2026. Last updated October 4, 2026.