Open Source Research
MIT, apparently has a Free / Open Source Research Community
e.mit.edu/
There's a list of Research papers and researchers, and I found 2 projects that might be relevant, during my VERY brief wandering through the material:
Software Freedom, Open Software and the Participant's Motivation - A Multidisciplinary Study
And
The Ecology of Open Source Software Development
I haven't looked through them in detail, but they look quite interesting (at least in their abstracts).
If I feel inclined to go into further detail, I'll post some more info here at some point.