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.