OATP Phase 2

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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.
  • The expiration of the HOAP grant creates a new phase for all the HOAP sub-projects. OATP is just one of them. But the Open Access Directory (OAD) is another, and I say a bit about that in the last section below.
  • 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 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.

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. But in practice that meant two full-time jobs. I was 66 and needed to retreat to one full-time job.
  • I'm confident that if I had applied for new funding, I'd have had a good chance of succeeding. But I had reasons not to try.
  • Moreover, 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.
  • All that I've said here about OATP, also applies to the Open Access Directory (OAD).
    • For more on the consequences of this phase shift for OAD, see the last section below.

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

  • 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.