Like any other online research, the first step is to google the terms you're looking for and see what big G's algorithm and world searches have prepared for you. After picturing the situation with Google it is possible to go a little forward and try to have an overview of the daily chat on Open Access by following the discussion on Twitter. That's what we did, and here are the results.
We typed the most generic query, "open access", and searched it on Google. We then picked the first four pages as further results were mostly off topic pages. We then put these results on Voyant, a software that helps analyzing URL's by managing indexing the most used terms. Stopwords and the query itself were excluded from the research.
In order to make something similar about Twitter too we looked for the equally generic hashtag "#openaccess" and a few others found on Tweetchup, a useful service that analyses one hashtag and finds all the most common ones written along with it. Then Twitonomy helped us make a list of the 100 most recent posts about OA and clean it from accidental results, and then gave us a list of the most active users.
Both visualizations are very easy to read: there is a tag cloud with most common terms bigger and less common ones gradually get smaller and lighter. While on Google the map is static, on the Twitter map it is possible to hover different accounts and see the most used words by each of them.
We found nothing unexpected on Google, with all the bigger words being general academic publications related realities. As a consequence, this helped us generate ideas about OA but not about its controversies, thus we moved towards a discussion oriented medium, Twitter. The first, not necessarily expected finding is that the discussion is active and there are quite a lot of related hashtags. The only problem is that all the main actors in the debate are publishers and people directly involved in the Open Access who only talk to each other and not to the public.
