OATP conventions

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.

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• This is a section within the larger OA tracking project (OATP).

Tagging guidelines

Primary and secondary tags

• OATP has only one primary tag, oa.new. Use this tag for OA developments that are new within the last six months, at the time of tagging. Also use it for new articles and comments about older developments.

• Secondary tags cover OA subtopics, such as OA in a certain field, OA in a certain language, OA in a certain country, or certain aspects of OA itself, such as OA through repositories, OA through journals, OA and copyright, OA business models, and so on.

• Always use the primary tag oa.new for new items and always omit it for older items.

• Always use the major secondary or subtopic tags, whether the item is new or old. A subtopic tag is major if it appears on the OATP list of approved tags -- which is a subset of the full list of attested tags.
  • Example: If an item is about OA in a certain field, then tag it by field (e.g. oa.anthropology, oa.biology, oa.chemistry). If a field is only mentioned incidentally, then don't bother with field tags.
  • Example: If an item is about OA in a certain country, then tag it by country (e.g. oa.argentina, oa.brazil, oa.china). If it's not about OA in a certain country, but a country is mentioned incidentally, then don't bother with country tags.
  • Example: If an item is about a certain aspect of OA, then tag it by that aspect or subtopic (e.g. oa.advocacy, oa.books, oa.copyright).
  • Every OATP tag generates a feed to which users can subscribe. One purpose of subtopic tags is to enable users to subscribe to the subtopics they care most about (e.g. OA in their own country, or OA in their own field, or OA of a certain kind). The more we use secondary or subtopic tags, the more we help users customize their subscriptions. Another purpose of subtopic tags is to organize knowledge in the field and support searching by tags. Again, the more we use subtopic tags, the more we help users fine-tune their searches.

User-defined tags

• Feel free to invent new tags as you go. However, try not to use a user-defined tag when there's already an existing, approved OATP tag for the same topic.
  • Example: If there's no tag for a new OA-related organization or new OA-related subtopic, feel free to create one (e.g. oa.abc, oa.xyz).

• If you don't have time to check to see whether OATP already has an approved tag for a given topic, just use a tag that makes sense to you. With TagTeam, OATP project managers can automatically convert synonymous tags to the same tag, or deprecated tags to approved tags. For example, TagTeam automatically converts oa.monographs and oa.ebooks to oa.books.

• When you invent tags, please follow the OATP conventions for tag syntax, below.

Descriptions

• Always add an excerpt, paraphrase, or summary in the "description" field of the TagTeam bookmarklet.

• If the piece has an abstract, just enter "Abstract: " and then cut/paste all or part of the abstract.

• If the piece doesn't have an abstract, then quote or paraphrase an OA-relevant passage. Finding a pertinent passage will help OATP readers who want a sense of what the piece is about in order to decide whether they want to click through to the full text. The more pertinent the passage, the more we help users. Feel free to include several passages separated by ellipses (e.g. "This...and this...and this...").

• If you use a quotation, always put it in quotation marks. Exception: If you quote the abstract and and label it as the abstract, then you needn't put it in quotation marks.

• If your quoted description contains an acronym that many readers may not understand, spell it out in square brackets.

• When the original file does not support cutting and pasting (e.g. a locked PDF, or an image-scan), then either re-key an excerpt or compose your own summary or description.

Titles

• Make sure the item's title is correct in the tag record. Sometimes the TagTeam bookmarklet grabs the title of the periodical rather than the title of the article, or the title of the blog rather than the title of the blog post. Sometimes it truncates the title. Sometimes it leaves the title field blank. When the TagTeam bookmarklet form is open for you to fill out, you can see its proposal for the item title and edit it for correctness

Use of English

• OATP aims to cover news and developments in all countries and languages. But it aims to do so in English.

• All descriptions should be in English.
  • If the tagged work is not in English, then the description should be the tagger's English-language summary or paraphrase, the tagger's English translation of an excerpt, or a machine translation of an excerpt.
  • If you use a machine translator like Google Translate to generate an English translation of a non-English excerpt, then put the excerpt in quotation marks and precede it with a line to this effect: "From Google's English: " We don't want readers to blame the author for the clumsy language of a machine translation.

• User-defined tags need not be in English.
  • Example: If an article is about OA books, then tag it with English tag oa.books, but feel free to add an equivalent non-English tag as well, such as oa.libros, oa.livres, or oa.buecher. And so on for all other subtopic tags.

• Titles need not be in English. The title of the work you're tagging should remain in its original language.

• When the tagged item is not in English, always use a tag for the original language (e.g. oa.arabic, oa.bulgarian, oa.chinese). If the item is not in English and is about a OA in a particular country, then use both a language tag and a country tag (e.g. oa.french and oa.france).

URL parameters

• Remove superfluous parameters from right end of the URL of the item before you tag it. These parameters often appear to the right of the "?" character.
  • TagTeam removes duplicate records, but only treats items as duplicates when they have the same URL. Hence, removing needless URL parameters maximizes the chance that the same item will always be tagged with the same URL, and this will make best use of TagTeam's deduping feature.

Events

• If you want to include conference or workshop, before or after it occurs, first tag for OATP (with oa.events plus relevant subtopic tags). Then take a moment to see whether the event is listed on the events page of the Open Access Directory (OAD). If not, please add it.
  • Please follow the format for other event entries in the OAD.
  • If you've never added information to the OAD before, you'll have to register. But registration is free and easy. Naturally the OAD is OA for reading and reuse, but it requires registration for contributors in order to limit spam.
• 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 any OA-related feed.

Items already tagged

• If an item has already been tagged for OATP, then you will see the existing tags and description in the TagTeam bookmarklet when you try to tag the same item yourself. When this happens, you could close the bookmarklet and move on to something else. Or you could take a minute to review the tags and description, and see whether you could improve upon them.

• If you add a tag, your new tag will be added to the OATP record for that item. If you revise a tag, your new one will be added but the original tag will remain in the database. If you delete a tag, the original will remain in the database.
  • The only way to remove a tag from the OATP database is in TagTeam itself, not the bookmarklet. This is deliberate, since the bookmarklet assumes that all the tags applied to the same item, by all users, should be merged and preserved in the database.

DOI-based URLs

• When an item has a working DOI-based URL, please replace the standard URL in the bookmarklet with the DOI-based URL.
  • Example: If you want to tag the article at this URL, http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=17085210&show=abstract, then replace that URL in the bookmarklet with this URL, http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/02640471311312375.
  • When an article shows the DOI but doesn't have a pre-built DOI-based URL for you to copy, you can create the DOI-based URL by appending the DOI to http://dx.doi.org/

• But beware: Not all articles with DOIs have working DOI-based URLs. If you have time, please test the DOI-based URL.

Clusters of relevant items

• When a journal has a special issue on an OA-related topic, try to tag all the relevant articles separately.

• When a conference has many presentations on OA, each with a unique URL, try to tag all relevant presentations separately.

• If you don't have time to tag separate items separately, tag the journal table of contents for that issue, or the conference presentation page. Then use the description field to say why these articles or presentations are relevant.

Tagging soon

• One mission of OATP is to provide real-time alerts about what's new in the world of OA. When you see a relevant item, please try to tag it quickly. Ideally, all new developments will be tagged within hours of their first appearance online.

Pacing yourself

• Despite the need to tag items soon after they appear, there are some reasons to pace yourself. TagTeam publishes its feeds in RSS, Atom, and JSON, and makes use of third-party tools to convert these feeds into other useful formats, such as Email, Twitter, Google+. Unfortunately, the best RSS-to-Twitter tools (so far), and the best RSS-to-Google+ tools (so far), do not forward more than five feed items in any 30 minute period. If OATP has more items in that period, the people who follow our feeds on Twitter or Google+ will not see them all our items. See two of Peter Suber's blog posts about this problem (1 and 2).

• We currently use Feedburner as our RSS-to-Twitter tool, and HootSuite as our RSS-to-Google+ tool. If you can find better tools that do not abridge the feeds, please let us know!

Tagging items that may soon disappear

• If you tag an item that may not stay online long, such as a job ad, try to put all the relevant details in the description field for preservation.

Neutral tagging

• Tagging an item for OATP is not an endorsement. If a new article is relevant to OA, but you dislike its perspective, OATP still wants to include it. OATP provides alerts and organizes knowledge of the field. It leaves critique for articles, blog posts, forum discussions, conference presentations, and other venues.

• The "description" box in the tagging dialog should also be a neutral excerpt or paraphrase. Don't use it to express opinions about the work you are tagging.
  • If you're moved to write a rebuttal to a work you tag for OATP, don't do it in the OATP tag record. Write your rebuttal in a separate blog post (or other online location) and then tag your rebuttal.

• The oa.negative tag is for objections or obstacles to OA, not for what you regard as low-quality work about OA.

• Also see the section on items you may omit, below.

Identifying spam

• If you see an item utterly unrelated to OA in a project feed, then take a moment to tag it with oa.spam.

• The OATP primary feed is intelligent enough to omit items tagged with oa.spam. However, even when it's too late for this tag to exclude the spam from the primary feed, your tag will still help project managers remove the spam from the database, exclude the spam from searches, and expel spammers.

Taggable items

On-topic v. off-topic items

• OATP focuses on open access to research. Tag anything directly related to that topic.

• There are many neighboring topics that overlap with OA to research. Don't tag everything on these topics, but do tag the items in the overlap area, or items that are themselves directly related to OA. For example, copyright is one of these neighboring topics. Don't tag everything on copyright (please!), but do tag items on copyright that are directly related to OA. Here are some examples of neighboring topics:
  • Academic freedom; academic publishing; altmetrics; copyright, fair use, and the public domain; digital divide; digital publishing; digitization; DRM; ebooks and ebook readers; free and open-source software; free online non-academic content (like music or news); freedom of speech and censorship; impact metrics; journal prices; legal regulation of the internet, libraries, and publishing; library budgets; libraries in the digital age; licensing terms for online content; media concentration and monopoly; metadata; non-OA scholarly journals or research literature; OA to non-research content such as music and movies; online teaching and learning; open educational resources; open government; P2P file-sharing; peer review reform and variations; plagiarism, defamation, and scientific misconduct; preservation; privacy and anonymity; research funding; search engines; the semantic web; text and data mining.
  • Exceptions: In a small number of cases, OATP tries to tag all items on a certain topic even though some items on that topic are not strongly connected to OA. These exceptions arose for different reasons, usually because OATP already had a good start on a comprehensive list. We'll try to keep these exceptions few in number:
    • Google Books (tag: oa.google.books)
    • Google Book Settlement (tag: oa.google.settlement).
    • We formerly put "Public sector information" (oa.psi) in this category. But today OATP aims for completeness on research data (oa.data) and not on government data (pubic sector information or oa.psi).

New items v. old items

• Use oa.new for items that are new within the last six months or so. Also use oa.new for new articles and comments about older developments.

• Use any relevant secondary or subtopic tags when tagging older items. Just remember to omit oa.new. For more on tagging older items, see the next entry on retroactive tagging.

Retroactive tagging

• OATP launched in April 2009. While it has been quite comprehensive, it has missed some items between then and now, and it has missed nearly all items from before April 2009. Hence, we strongly encourage retroactive tagging, or the tagging of items that are not new enough for the oa.new tag and not already tagged for OATP. The process is simple: 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 the same subtopics.

• Some OATP tags are retroactively comprehensive because users have systematically searched for online articles on those subtopics and tagged them with the relevant tags. In the OATP tags page, we annotate these tags as "Retroactively comprehensive since about (date)."
  • If you make a tag retroactively comprehensive, please let us know and we will annotate the tag accordingly.
  • When a tag is retroactively comprehensive, users will have more confidence in using that tag to include or exclude items from searches.

Online v. offline items

• We can only tag online pages, not print works or digital files offline on your device.

• If you find a relevant work in print, look for an online edition to tag. If need be, tag an online metadata record, announcement, review, or advertisement, anything online to get the work into the OATP feed and database.

• If you click on a link to an item, and a PDF downloads to your hard drive, rather than displaying in your browser, then look for an online splash page for the same work.

Best sources v. other sources

• Tag the actual content whenever you can, not just a pointer to the content. If you learn about a relevant article from a blog post, then always tag the article itself. Only tag the blog post as well if it adds significant commentary or deserves to be tagged in its own right.

OA v. non-OA versions

• Tag relevant items whether or not they are themselves OA.

• If an item is not itself OA, then include some relevant excerpts in the "description" box, for example from the abstract. And don't forget to add the oa.ta tag (for "toll access").

• If an article exists in both OA and non-OA versions, at least tag the OA version, in order to help OATP users click through to full-text. If you have reason to think that the link to the non-OA version is more durable, or that the non-OA version is later or superior, then tag that version as well (again, with the oa.ta tag).

• Whenever you tag a non-OA scholarly article, also flag the article with the OA button.

Mobile v. non-mobile versions

• If you discover a tag-worthy page with a mobile device, try to view the web or non-mobile version of the page before tagging it.

• Note that the oa.mobile tag is for OA-related developments for mobile devices, whether or not the pages describing those developments are displayed in mobile format.

Adding original content

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

Items you may omit

• Feel free to omit very short items like tweets, listserv messages, and comments on blog posts.

• Feel free to omit blog posts written as class assignments, especially if they weak, poorly written, very brief, or elementary.

• Omit items containing nothing new.
  • Example: Omit a blog post that merely gives a summary of another post or article, unless the summary is unusually well done. It's better to skip the summary and tag the primary source.
  • Example: Omit a blog post simply alerting readers to an old policy, tool, article, etc., with minimal new comment.

• Omit introductions to OA for newcomers unless they unusually well done. Then use the oa.intro tag.

• Omit reprints or repostings of relevant articles published elsewhere. In cases like this, try to tag the primary source instead of the reprint. If the primary source is online, tag it. If it's not OA and you can find an OA edition, then also tag an OA edition. But if you keep finding new OA editions, you needn't and shouldn't tag them all.

• Feel free to omit items based on deep misunderstanding, whether innocent or cynical. This is a hard call, because we want to include even articles that highly critical of OA (with tag oa.negative). But one purpose of OATP is to raise the level of understanding of OA, and we undermine this purpose when we raise the visibility of distortion and deception. At the same time, however, feel free to tag such items in the spirit of documenting the distortion and deception still in circulation.

• Feel free to omit announcements from notorious scams or predators, and posts or articles from clueless authors who promote scams and predators because they don't know the difference. There's no problem with erring on the side of tagging or inclusion, if you like, but neither is there a problem in omitting what you regard as the promotion of dishonesty.

• Also see the section on neutral tagging, above.

Tag syntax

• OATP tags are composed of these elements: oa + dot + subtopic (word or phrase). For example: oa.something, not oasomething and not just something.
  • The oa. prefix separates our tags from other tags using the same words or phrases. For example, tags like policies and journals could cover developments unrelated to OA, but oa.policies and oa.journals only cover developments related to OA.
  • The oa. prefix means "in connection with OA" or "related to OA", not necessarily "in support of OA". Hence even an article criticizing OA journals should be tagged oa.journals. So should an article focusing on TA journals and comparing them with OA journals.

• Omit spaces. For example: oa.something, not oa something.
  • Some tagging platforms, like Connotea, would treat the latter as two separate tags, oa and something, and we'd lose the benefit of the oa. prefix. Other platforms, like TagTeam, would regard oa something as a single tag, but would ignore it in searches for the oa.something tag.

• Use lower case letters only. For example: oa.something, not oa.Something. This is the rule even for proper nouns. For example: oa.france, not oa.France.
  • TagTeam automatically decapitalizes upper-case letters.

• Use an underscore for phrases. For example: oa.fair_use, not oa.fair use or oa.fairuse or oa.fair-use.
  • Or use an acronym for phrases. For example, oa.pd, not oa.public_domain. See the tags page to see whether the underscore or acronym version is recommended for a given phrase.

• Use a hyphen where the original used a hyphen. For example: oa.wiley-blackwell.

• Use an ampersand (without flanking spaces) where the original used an ampersand. For example: oa.taylor&francis.

• Use additional dots for additional levels of subtopic subordination. For example: oa.case is for case studies, while oa.case.policies is for case studies on OA policies, and oa.case.policies.universities is for case studies on OA policies at universities.

• In general, use plural nouns rather than singular nouns. For example: oa.repositories, not oa.repository.
  • But use a singular noun for the genre of the item you are tagging. For example, when tagging an editorial, use oa.editorial. And so on for oa.case, oa.comment, oa.interview, oa.letter, oa.preprint, oa.presentation, oa.report, oa.review. In short, in an article is about preprints, use oa.preprints, but if it is itself a preprint, use oa.preprint.
  • Also use the singular for nouns used in an adjectival sense, for example, oa.crowd.

• The evolving tag vocabulary or ontology for OATP is in English, and the descriptions added to tag records should be in English.
  • Even while OATP builds its ontology, it welcomes a folksonomy of user-defined tags, including tags not in English. However, we cannot promise that user-defined tags will remain unmodified as the project ontology continues to evolve. Deprecated tags may be modified to become approved tags, and non-English tags may be modified to become English tags. As always, however, these modifications will only affect the TagTeam copies of these tags. If the tags were originally made in another platform, the originals will remain unmodified.

• Not all existing OATP tags conform to these conventions. But many tagging platforms, including TagTeam, support retroactive tag revision and over time we hope to bring noncompliant tags into compliance.

Tag convergence

• OATP started as an informal folksonomy but is evolving toward a more formal ontology. One way we are doing this is through the power of TagTeam to convert deprecated tags to approved tags automatically.
  • Note that this process only affects the TagTeam copies of tag records, for example, for publishing output feeds and searching. If you tagged items on another platform (such as CiteULike or Delicious), this will not affect your original tags.

• As the project decides on the best tags to use for certain subtopics, we record them on the page of project tags. Please follow the usage on that page.

• Not all existing tags conform to the emerging OATP ontology. But over time we hope to bring noncompliant tags into compliance.