About a year ago, I posted about works-in-progress, including a research study Don Taylor & I were planning, a research study on supports for open access among Canadian libraries. The post was spotted by our UBC colleague Devon Greyson, who contacted us about similar interests at UBC. Since then, the study grew to a pan-Canadian survey on research supports by Canadian university libraries and research administration offices, by a team consisting of UBC's Dr. Charlyn Black (health policy expert and member of the committee that developed the CIHR policy), and Devon Greyson, myself & Don Taylor, and Concordia University's open access coordinator Kumiko Vezina, with lots of help from many people at several institutions. Preliminary results were presented at the 2nd International PKP Conference in Vancouver last month; see the blogpost. The team has just submitted the paper for peer-review; watch for more details on results in formal publication and further presentations. This post will not address the results of this study pe se, but rather is a recommendation: if you are planning a research study, let people know! You just might find yourself part of a larger study, with more people to share the work so that a larger study can be done with reasonable efforts by all. Many thanks to everyone on the team for this experience.
One way to share your research-in-progress, if it is about open access, is to post to the Open Access Directory's Research in Progress page. There are some interesting studies already underway listed there!
