Laakso been researching the changing landscape towards openness in scholarly publishing by studying combinations of bibliometrics, web metrics, business models, science policy, and researcher behavior for almost 10 years. He defended his PhD thesis on the subject of Open Access journal publishing in 2014. In addition to research Laakso is also active in open science advocacy, being the chairman of both the national working group on open publishing practices as part of the Open Science Initiative managed by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland, and the FinnOA working group. Additionally he is a member of the strategy group supporting journal publisher negotiations on behalf of the Finnish university library consortium (FinElib).