OATP Phase 2

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

OATP will enter an all-volunteer phase in August 2018. We need your help to tag for the project, and recruit other taggers, if it is not to decline in quantity and quality.

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. — 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.
  • In 2011, OATP became part of the 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, OATP's crowd-sourced character 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 Open Access Directory (OAD) is another, and I say a bit about that in the last section below.

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

• Here's how.
  • Use this "how" page to get started or see what's involved. Also share it with any potential recruits or promising prospects.

• Here's why.
  • We welcome all kinds of taggers. On the "why" page we list nine kinds.

Why not continue grant funding?

• For the last 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. But in practice, as you can expect, that meant two full-time jobs, and I needed to retreat to one full-time job. (Plus I was already past retirement age.)

• Those are the main reasons why I didn't apply for new funding to support HOAP. If I had, I'm confident that I'd have had a good chance of succeeding, and extending the grant-funded phase of OATP a few years further.

• Howwever, 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 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 starting 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 of an immature 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. (The same is true for OAD, below.)

• 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 Phase 1 carry over to Phase 2. 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 Open Access Directory (OAD). The same grant funds 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 steadily enlarged nearly every list in OAD. But most of all, they enlarged the lists of events, or conferences and workshops related to OA. When we encountered new events, our practice was to tag them for OATP with the "oa.events" tag, and add them to the list of OAD events. We still encourage OATP taggers to take the extra step to add events to the OAD, but those strapped for time may not take the extra step.

• 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. Here's how.