Research in progress

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.

• This is a list of active research projects on open access. To keep entries short, please link to online descriptions or project pages when possible. Please include contact information for the principal investigators.

• Related lists on OAD: (1) Research questions, and (2) Volunteer opportunities.

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• Assessing of the Economic and Social Impact of the Public Domain in the Information Society
  • This is a project sponsored by the European Commission. Rightscom Ltd is the lead partner. More information on the project and the other project partners can be found here. The project is currently searching for any data sources that will help us to make estimates of the number of public domain works in the EU (literary and artistic works, music and audiovisual material). We are also interested in any data about how public domain works get used. If you can help please e-mail [email protected]. Many thanks in advance.

• Defining and Measuring Success Variables of Open Access Journals
  • Investigators: Robin Peek (email) and Athanasia Pontika
  • Funded by the Hollowell Research Fund. Open Access (OA) journals are being developed at an aggressive rate around the world but the number of journals can be deceptive because no research has been done to analyze how successful these journals are in establishing basic attributes such as gaining sufficient submissions to keep and maintain a routine publication schedule. Concerns have been raised about how successful this influx of new journals can be (Crawford, August, 2008) and if any predictor variables may explain why some journals are more likely to succeed than others. The ease by which new journals can be created can and does mean that a journal might even become nothing more than an empty shell the little or no submissions, while other OA journals thrive.

• Gathering Firm Evidence on the Limits of Toll Access
  • Investigators: Bill Hooker (email) and Graham Steel (email)
  • This project commenced in Sept '08 whilst in 'beta' within a FriendFeed room. As such, this represents a very small fraction of STM academics whose research is 'buffered' by TA. That said, the Investigators report (here) that this is a solid foundation for additional building upon. Similar to the above, the first results of Phase One were collated, Dec '08.
  • As matters stand (April '12), there are now 348 members of the References Wanted room at FriendFeed. The Investigators are keen to roll this out a bit further, hence this inclusion in the OAD wiki.
  • initial statistics and some discussion of future directions here and here

• It's time we capture those moments of individual frustration and turn them into positive change
  • OA Button
  • Main Investigators: David E Caroll and Joseph McArthur
  • Currently in Beta mode. Millions don’t have access to research they need – we aim to turn these individual injustices into positive change. We’re currently developing the open access button, described here. Throughout development we’ll be posting news, thoughts, media and more on this site so check back regularly! We’re looking for this to be a highly collaborative project, please get in touch with thoughts, suggestions, collaborations and anything else that takes your fancy. Also, we’re mad about twitter – find us at @OAbutton OA Button officially launched 18th November 2013 during Berlin11.

• How the NIH policy influences the authors' publishing decisions
  • This doctoral dissertation study explores how the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded principal investigators (PIs) view of open access and how the mandatory public access NIH policy has influenced their publishing behavior. Investigator: Athanasia (Nancy) Pontika.

• Reuse of published scientific datasets
  • Investigators: Heather Piwowar (email) and Todd Vision (email), through DataONE
  • First, we are developing and evaluating scalable methods to track scientific dataset reuse. We'll then analyze the dataset citations to understand the prevalence and patterns of reuse. Initial approach depends on full-text mining of published literature for gene expression dataset accession numbers.
  • Motivation on blog, and details and open research notes at Open Wet Ware project page.

• Society publishers with open access journals
  • Investigators: Peter Suber (email) and Caroline Sutton (email)
  • The project has two phases. Phase One is to make a comprehensive list of scholarly societies worldwide that support gold OA for their own journals. Phase Two will survey the societies discovered in Phase One in order to learn details about their turn to OA, their business models, and the financial and academic consequences of their OA policies.
  • The first results of Phase One were published in SOAN for November 2007. However, Phase One is not complete and we are still enlarging our list. The current version of our list is OA in an Excel spreadsheet under a Creative Commons Attribution license. We welcome additions and corrections. Phase Two has not yet begun.

• Survey of Authors Publishing in Open Access Journals with Article Processing Charges
  • Investigators: David Solomon (email) and Bo-Christer Björk (email)
  • This project is a survey of authors who had published recently in OA journals that charge article processing fees (APCs).
    • The short survey focused on four areas: 1)The source of the funding used for paying the APC 2) Factors influencing the author’s choice of the journal which they published 3) The maximum APC the author would be willing to pay to publish an article in a desired journal 4) The number of peer-reviewed articles they had published over the last 5 years in subscription, OA and OA journals with APCs.
    • Article information including corresponding author's email address and country; the discipline discipline category (see below) and publisher of the journal; were retrieved off the journal web site from journals sampled from the DOAJ in seven discipline areas. 1) Health Sciences, Biology and Life Sciences 2) Education, Social Sciences, Law and Political Science 3)History and Archaeology, Arts and Architecture, Languages and Literatures 4) Technology, Engineering, Mathematic and Statistics, Computer Science 5) Business and Economics 6) Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Physics and Astronomy 7) Agriculture and Forestry. Approximately 15 articles generally from 2001 were sampled from each journal.
    • An example of the survey
    • A total of 1,038 authors from 74 journals were surveyed.
  • The pilot of 123 authors from four journals has been completed and data collection from the main study largely been completed. We currently have approximately 410 completed surveys or about 40% of the surveyed authors. We hope to make some very preliminary results available in the next few weeks and have the complete survey results ready for publication this summer.

• The accessibility of open access scholarship in university libraries
  • Investigator: Sigi Jottkandt (email)
  • This project looks at the cataloguing policies of international university libraries with respect to open access publications. It will be composed of a survey of large research university libraries to determine which libraries include specified OA journals in their OPACs, with a follow-up study of the OA-cataloguing libraries to try to establish the factors that led them to their decision.