OATP FAQ
From OAD
- This is a section within the larger OA tracking project (OATP).
- This FAQ is based on Peter Suber's article in SOAN for May 2, 2009. It's now larger and more current.
Do I have to register to take part?
No. To take part as a reader, just start reading the project feed. To take part as a tagger, just start tagging. For details on reading and tagging, see the next few questions.
What's in the project feed?
The project feed includes all the items tagged with oa.new at Connotea. It doesn't include all new OA developments, although that's the goal. It only includes the new developments noticed and tagged by project participants.
If an item is not tagged with oa.new, then it won't appear in the project feed, even if it's tagged with many other OA-related tags and appears in many other related feeds.
How can I read the project feed?
If you're comfortable with RSS, then subscribe to the feed with your favorite RSS reader. You can use the default project feed, with the 10 most recent items. Or you can use a variation with 50, 100, or more of the most recent items. You can also subscribe to a version which filters out duplicates or which filters out kinds of news you may not care to track. The URLs for all of these versions of the feed are available here:
If you're not comfortable with RSS feeds, then you can view the feed on a blog-like web page with the most recent items displayed first. Bookmark the page and visit whenever you like.
You can also subscribe to an email version of the feed or follow a Twitter version.
How do I become a tagger?
Create an account at Connotea and (recommended) drag the "Add to Connotea" bookmarklet to your browser.
When you find a new OA development you'd like to tag, just click on the bookmarklet and type oa.new in the "tags" field of the pop-up dialog box. For our purposes, a development is "new" if it occurred within the last six months. Use the oa.new tag for new developments and for new articles and comments about older developments.
If you have time, type a brief description in the "description" field of the dialog box. Your description will appear in the feed for others to read. (The dialog also gives you a chance to add a "comment", which will not appear in the feed.)
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.
The feed is missing things. How can we make it more comprehensive?
Become a participant and tag items yourself. Recruit other participants.
The feed is too large. How can I track just a subset of it?
One way is to subscribe to a version of the project feed which removes duplicate items.
You can slim down the project feed even further by using Yahoo Pipes to filter the project feed for certain keywords. For example, you could create a custom feed that only contained the words "repository", "journal", and "policy", or any other combination of words in any Boolean relationship. Your custom feed will draw from all the items in the full project feed, not just from those tagged with particular subtopic tags. If use of the subtopic tags you care most about is scattered or inconsistent, this is the best way to create a custom subset feed.
You can also use Yahoo Pipes to filter the project feed and remove items with certain keywords or tags. For example, if you want to follow all new OA developments except those about open education, you could filter the project feed to exclude items using the word "education" or tagged with oa.oer or oa.oers.
If the subtopic tags you care most about (for example, oa.biology, oa.france, oa.mandate) are widely used, then you can subscribe to the feed for any individual tag or any combination of tags, including combinations of project and non-project tags. For example, the feed from oa.mandate is smaller than the feed for oa.new (the project feed). So is the conjunction of the two, that is, the single feed of items tagged with oa.mandate AND oa.new. You could use Yahoo Pipes again to make such a customized feed. If your custom feed is based on tags rather than keywords, then you could skip Yahoo Pipes and use methods described in the Connotea Guide section on multiple users and tags.
When you build a custom feed, add it to the OATP mashups page at the OAD, so that others can benefit from it as well. Also check that section to see what other custom feeds are already available.
This flexibility is a major advantage of working with feeds. But if it's intimidating, then simply follow the unfiltered project feed (by RSS, email, or web). If it's larger than you like, just skim it. After a time you may be ready to create a custom-filtered version of the feed, or someone else may have created the custom feed you need.
One goal for the future is to incorporate user ratings so that you can subscribe to the full project feed but only view the subset of items with a rating above a certain level.
How do I search the project feed?
Go to the Connotea tag library for oa.new and run a search from the box at the top of the page. The default is to search for keywords in the feed. But if you want to search by tag or tagger, those options are available from the pull-down menu. The syntax for advanced searching is described in the Connotea Guide.
If you subscribe to an RSS version of the project feed, then don't overlook the search function in your favorite RSS reader. In Google Reader, for example, you can use a Google-powered search engine for any one of your subscribed feeds or any folder of related feeds.
Why Connotea (Part 1)? Isn't Connotea from Nature, a non-OA publisher?
Yes, Connotea is from Nature. But it's open-source, optimized for extracting citations from scholarly sources, supports DOIs, and allows users to export tag libraries in multiple formats, including those most useful to scholarly authors.
In addition, Connotea supports bookmarklets, OpenID, and retroactive tag revision. The latter allows participants to modify their past tags (e.g. changing oa.workshop and oa.conference to oa.event), supporting what the Connotea developers call "tag convergence" for improving the coherence and utility of folksonomies.
OpenID, meanwhile, prevents users from having to create a new login for yet another Web service. If you have an account on popular services such as AOL, Blogger, Flickr, LiveJournal, Technorati, Yahoo, or WordPress.com, you already have an OpenID you can use to log into Connotea. Several other services provide OpenIDs, or you can host your own.
Why Connotea (Part 2)? I already use another tagging service.
Most other tagging services lack the special academic features of Connotea. CiteULike is an exception and includes most of them, but it's not open-source.
Right now the project feed is limited to items tagged oa.new in Connotea. But if participants introduce the oa.new tag to other systems, such as BibSonomy, CiteULike, Delicious, Digg, Diigo, SparTag.us, or Technorati, then you can use Yahoo Pipes to create a combination feed out of all those separate feeds. In that sense, the project isn't limited to Connotea, but is merely starting with Connotea.
What are "subtopic tags"?
These are tags on any subtopic of OA, such as oa.policies, oa.repositories, and oa.journals. All subtopic tags are user-defined, but follow a common format (oa.something). Subtopic tags classify OA-related resources online, new or old. For more details, see the page of OATP tags.
Subtopic tags do not put the tagged items into the OATP project feed. Only the oa.new tag will put an item into the project feed.
Like other Connotea tags, each subtopic tag supports an RSS feed. Like other RSS feeds, the subtopic feeds can be combined, filtered, or used in mashups.
The family of subtopic tags constitutes a folksonomy of OA, or a folksonomy in the process of becoming an ontology. The OATP does not presuppose a consensus ontology. Instead, it supports the evolution of one by providing a wiki page for project participants to list, annotate, and discuss the user-defined tags.
Within the OATP, the use of the oa.new tag (for alerts) is primary, and the use of subtopic tags (for classification) is secondary.
