OATP tips

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.

Project tips are suggestions on how to help or be helped by the project. For more settled decisions and agreements on how to carry out the project, see the page on project conventions.

[edit] Tips for readers

If you subscribe to a feed by RSS or email, don't use a version that only shows the 10 most recent items. If there are more than 10 new items before the feed refreshes, you'll miss some of them. For other options, see Versions of the project feed.

To read a version of the project feed that filters out duplicates, see OATP mashups.
- But be careful. Often the first person to tag an item will use oa.new and omit subtopic tags. The next users to see the item might tag it with oa.new and subtopic tags. If so, you'll see the first tag record only and fail the benefit from the subtopic tags added by subsequent users. Among other things, seeing the subtopic tags applied by others can help you decide whether to click through to read the full text.
- We're trying to get Connotea to show users a consolidated tag record, but this feature may not appear any time soon.

The austerity of tag records is an advantage (they're easier to read or skim than an equal number of blog posts or articles) and a disadvantage (they contain less information than blog posts or articles). If you trust the relevance of feed items and want to skip the austere tag records and jump straight to the tagged texts themselves, then subscribe to the project feed with Google Reader. Put the "Next" bookmarklet in your browser toolbar. Clicking on it will take you to the next item in the feed --not just the next austere tag record but the next full-text article that was tagged.

Another reason to subscribe to the project feed with Google Reader: It offers Google-based searching of the feed all the way back to the feed's beginning, even if you didn't start subscribing until some later date.

Try to avoid adding a project tag to an item already carrying that tag, especially oa.new. Duplicate tags will put duplicate copies in the tag feeds.
- At this point in OATP's development, it's hard to avoid all duplication. We're working on tools to prevent it without any work on the tagger's part. But in the meantime, do what you can, for example, by reading or searching the oa.new feed before adding oa.new to a new item.

Connotea does a good job extracting the citations of the pieces you tag and displaying them in the feed. However, it will sometimes mistake the title of a blog for the title of a blog post. In those cases, just cut/paste the proper title into the "title" field of the dialog box.

To put an original piece of news or comment into the project feed, first put it online in a way that gives it a unique URL (blog post, discussion forum contribution, wiki section, standalone web page) and then tag the online version.

If you tag a conference or workshop, before or after it occurs, take a moment to see whether it's listed on the OAD Events page. If not, please add it.
- People looking for events in their area (to see what they could attend), or at a given future time (to avoid conflicts for their own future events), consult the OAD Events list more often than the Connotea feed. Hence it's even more helpful to post upcoming events to the OAD list than to tag them for OATP.

Tagging something for OATP is not an endorsement. If a new article about OA journals is wretchedly done, it still deserves the oa.journal tag. OATP is an alert service. Critique is left for articles, blog posts, forum discussions, conference presentations, and so on. People who are in a position to notice and correct an article's deficiencies still need a way to learn that the article exists.
- If you want to add a comment while tagging an item, use the "comment" box. If you use the "description" box, then make clear that you're making a comment, not quoting or paraphrasing the article.
- The oa.negative tag is for objections, obstacles, or setbacks to OA, not for low-quality work about OA.

If you see an item utterly unrelated to OA in a project feed, then take a moment to tag it with oa.spam. You can't remove a tag placed by someone else, but you can add this tag for the benefit of users who want to filter out spam.
- Also see the discussion of this strategy for dealing with spam.
- We're talking to Connotea about other strategies for eliminating spam from the project feeds and hope to have news to report soon.

Descriptions and comments
- If you add a "description" in the Connotea tag dialog, it will appear in the feed. If you add a "comment", it will not, although a link to it will appear in the feed.
- Always try to add a brief description or excerpt in the "description" box.
- When the original item is not in English, try to to add an English-language summary or translated excerpt in the description box.

Retroactive tagging
- Remember that OATP was launched in April 2009. While the project encourages retroactive tagging, little has been done so far. Make it a habit to tag older items as you encounter them. Use any relevant subtopic tags, but do not use oa.new.
- If you're doing a research project on OA, make a point of tagging all the OA-related literature you find online with relevant OATP subtopic tags. That will help you do your research and help other OATP users searching for work on those subtopics.
- If you systematically search for online articles on a certain subtopic of OA, and tag them with the relevant tag, then go do the OATP tags page and annotate that tag as "Retroactively comprehensive since about (date)." That will give users more confidence when using that tag to include or exclude items from searches.

Retroactive tag revision
- Connotea allows you to revise your tags retroactively. If you want to change all your own occurrences of oa.journal to oa.journals, just load your personal tag library and look for "Rename a tag" in the right-hand sidebar.
- Periodically look all the project tags you've used. Load your personal tag library and scan the list of tags in the left sidebar. If you see any that are misspelled or deprecated, use the "Rename a tag" command to change them retroactively.

If you have a blog:
- Put a widget in the sidebar to display the last 10 items from the project feed.

If you maintain a web page that links to an OATP tag library:
- Make sure that the OATP tags entry for that tag mentions your link. This not only gives you more exposure, but shows how people are using the OATP links.
- Check the OATP tags page periodically to see whether the tag has been deprecated and replaced with another. If it has, then you should link to the library for the new and preferred tag.

If you want to link to OATP output:
- To link to the tag library for a given tag: http://www.connotea.org/tag/TAG . For example: http://www.connotea.org/tag/oa.new .
- To link to the tag library of a given tagger: http://www.connotea.org/user/TAGGER . For example: http://www.connotea.org/user/petersuber .
- To link to the tag library of a given tagger for a given tag: http://www.connotea.org/user/TAGGER/tag/TAG . For example: http://www.connotea.org/user/petersuber/tag/oa.new .
- To link to an individual tag record: First go to theoa.new tag library, oa.new (or any other relevant tag library). Scroll or search until you find the tag record to which you want to link. The URL you want is under the word "info". For example: http://www.connotea.org/article/fe5f4475e5b415ecd81a9732da2b854a .