OATP Phase 2: Difference between revisions

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[[Main_Page|Harvard Open Access Project]] (HOAP) » [[Open Access Tracking Project]] (OATP) » '''OATP Phase 2'''
#REDIRECT [[OATP all-volunteer phase]]
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| style="background:yellow; color:black"  | <center> OATP will enter an all-volunteer phase in '''August 2018'''.<br>We need your help to tag for the project, and recruit other taggers,<br>if it is not to decline in quantity and quality.</center>
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Because the transition to the new phase of the [[Open Access Tracking Project]] (OATP) is the result of my circumstances and decisions, I must sometimes use the first-person pronoun to describe the new phase and its background. &mdash; [https://cyber.harvard.edu/~psuber/wiki/Peter_Suber Peter Suber].
 
== What's the new phase? ==
 
* OATP is entering a phase without direct grant funding.
** When I launched OATP in 2009, it had grant funding from the Wellcome Trust<!-- (2007-2009)--><!--and the Open Society Institute (2003-2009)-->.
** In 2011, OATP became part of the [[Main_Page|Harvard Open Access Project]] (HOAP), which had grant funding from Arcadia (2011-2016) and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (2016-2018).
** I'm voluntarily letting my HOAP grants expire without seeking new funds. The new phase is the post-grant phase.
 
* OATP was always crowd-sourced. But previously the crowd was on the small side (10-60 taggers, depending on the year), and previously the crowd was a mix of grant-funded and volunteer taggers. Hence, the crowd-sourced character of OATP is not new. What's new is that OATP will become all-volunteer and ramp up its efforts to recruit the crowd.
 
* I myself will continue to participate as a volunteer.
 
* The expiration of HOAP funding creates a new phase for all the HOAP sub-projects, and OATP is just one of them. The [http://oad.simmons.edu Open Access Directory] (OAD) is another, and I say a bit about that in the last section below.
 
== Please join us as a tagger, and help recruit others to join us! ==
 
* Without enough good taggers, OATP could decline in quantity and quality<!-- (comprehensiveness and relevance) -->. But with enough good taggers, it could improve in both.
 
* If you're the kind of person who already follows OA-related news, you're the kind of person we need.
** You could follow OA-related news systematically or sporadically. You could go looking for it, or you could simply pay attention when it appears in your inbox or social-media stream.
** You could follow it in a specific niche, such as an academic field, country, region, or language. We need taggers in every niche.
** You could follow all aspects of OA or focus on certain sub-topics, such as advocacy, author attitudes, books, business models, compliance, copyright, data, digitization, ECRs (early-career researchers), ETDs (electronic theses and dissertations, fees, funding agencies, gold developments, green developments, history of OA, hybrid journals, [[OATP_tags|and so on]]. We need taggers on every sub-topic.
** If you have leadership on OA in a certain area, and people trust your judgment about what new developments in that area are most worth reading, you could tag the items you recommend. We need [[Use_OATP_for_research_on_OA#Create_a_recommendation_feed|recommendation feeds]] in every niche and on every sub-topic.
 
* [[Get_started_as_a_tagger|Here's ''how'' to start tagging for OATP.]]
** Use our getting-started handout to join our team of taggers or see what's involved.
** When you find promising new potential taggers, the getting-started handout is the doc to share with them.
 
* [[Why_tag_for_OATP|Here's ''why'' to start tagging for OATP.'']]
** OATP is the most comprehensive source of news about OA. It supports a general news feed and hundreds of specialized news feeds. It stores all its tag records for easy searching and sharing. It helps the OA community stay on top of what's happening. It helps the OA community study and share what has happened in the past.
 
* The new phase is not a farewell. It's an invitation to take part.
 
== Why not seek new grant funding? ==
 
* For the seven years before this transition, I had two part-time jobs, one of which was to run the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP), which included OATP, OAD, and several other sub-projects. In practice, as you can imagine, that meant two full-time jobs. The short answer is that I needed to retreat to one full-time job. (It didn't help that I was already past retirement age.)
 
* That's the main reason why I didn't apply for new funding to support HOAP. The problem is not lack of funder interest or OATP utility. I'm confident that if I'd applied for new funds, I could have extended the grant-funded phase of OATP a few more years.
 
* However, OATP was always intended to be an all-volunteer, crowd-sourced project. The grant-funded years were an incubation period in which we could refine the project and the develop the underlying software, [[TagTeam]].
 
* If anyone else would like to seek funding to work on OATP, you're free to do so, and I'd be very happy to work with you on any details. I'm not even ruling out the possibility that I might seek new HOAP or OATP funding myself in the future. But for now, it's time to test the willingness of the OA community to keep OATP going as an all-volunteer project.
 
== Why not make the transition earlier? ==
 
* After launching OATP on a different tagging platform in 2009, we realized that OATP needed features not offered by any existing tagging platform, and decided to develop our own, [[TagTeam]]. OATP started running on TagTeam in 2012. But TagTeam needed more development time before it was ready for a large number of users, some of whom would be impatient with the quirks and rough edges of a young program. Hence, we deliberately delayed recruiting the crowd for this crowd-sourced project until TagTeam was ready. It became ready in the spring of 2018.
 
== The future of OATP ==
 
* OATP will continue as an all-volunteer project. I will continue to work on it as well, without funding.
 
* If you're already an OATP tagger, you might have noticed that many of the items you wanted to tag had already been tagged. This will change. Please don't let your expectations from the grant-funded years carry over to the new phase. More and more of the items you'd like to tag will ''not'' already be tagged, and we'll need your help more than ever to tag them.
 
== Implications for the Open Access Directory (OAD) ==
 
* The new phase for OATP will also be a new phase for the [http://oad.simmons.edu Open Access Directory] (OAD). The same HOAP grants that supported tagging for OATP also supported contributions to OAD. Now both these crowd-sourced projects will depend entirely on volunteers.
 
* Our grant-funded OAD contributors enlarged nearly every list in OAD. But most of all, they enlarged the [http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Events list of events], or conferences and workshops related to OA. When we encountered new events, our practice was to tag them for OATP, with the [http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/oa.events oa.events tag], ''and'' add them to the OAD events list. We still encourage OATP taggers to take the extra step and include events in the OAD. But we realize that not all those strapped for time will be able to do so.
 
* Just as OATP may decline in quantity and quality, OAD may also decline. But just as a good number of good recruits could improve OATP, the same could happen with OAD. Just as I encourage you to tag for OATP, I encourage you to contribute to OAD. [http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Getting_started_as_an_OAD_contributor Here's how].

Latest revision as of 11:57, 27 June 2018