The Open Access Tracking Project - OATP - TIB-Blog

"In a recent meta-study for the German Federal Ministry of Education and Science (abbreviated BMBF), TIB investigated the current state of research on the effects of Open Access. The report resulting from this study has also recently been published (“Wirkungen von Open Access”; https://doi.org/10.34657/7666), here in the blog I have summarised the results of the study. The study relied on the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) as a control instrument: Using the collection of Open Access references on OATP, we were able to systematically expand the literature on all of the impacts we examined and make sure that we did not overlook any significant studies. After completing the study, we supplemented OATP with the small amount of literature that had not been already recorded there. We use this opportunity to introduce this important resource for information on Open Access to the audience of the TIB blog.

The OATP is dedicated to collecting and making available all news and commentary on OA topics in one place. The platform was founded in 2009 by Peter Suber. Different from existing channels such as blogs, OATP was designed to provide a comprehensive collection of the growing number of contributions on OA topics via crowdsourcing. For this purpose, OATP relies on the open source software TagTeam, which was specially developed for OATP by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. Using TagTeam, users can link items on OATP and tag them in order to categorize their contents: For example, oa.benefit refers to entries on the benefits of Open Access; the tag oa.germany identifies entries on Open Access in Germany...."