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.

Tips for readers

Reading full text
- An OATP feed consists of tag records, which contain brief summaries or descriptions, with links to full texts. They do not contains full texts themselves. For some purposes, this austerity is an advantage: OATP tag records are easier to read or skim than an equal number of full texts. But for other purposes, it's a disadvantage: they contain less information than full texts.
- If you 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 the next austere tag record but the full-text item tagged by the next tag record.
  - Clearly this recommendation has been obsolete since Google pulled the plug on Reader in July 2014. If you know other tools with the same feature described here, please let us know.

Searching
- You can search the whole corpus of OATP tag records inside TagTeam. You needn't be a registered TagTeam user to do so.
  - For details on the flexibility of the TagTEam search engine, see the section on searching in the TagTeam manual.
- If you subscribe to an OATP feed with Google Reader, then you can take advantage of its 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.
  - Again, this powerful Google Reader feature is no longer available, and we welcome suggestions for other tools with the same feature.

Tagging events
- 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 any OA-related feed. Hence, if you had to choose, it's more helpful to post upcoming events to the OAD list than to tag them for OATP. But unless you're very short on time, you don't have to choose and can do both.

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 strongly disagree with hit, 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, obstacles, or setbacks to OA, not for low-quality work about OA.

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 primary project feed for OATP omits items tagged with oa.spam. If you notice some spam in the feed, it's already too late for your tag to exclude the spam from the feed. But your tag will still help project managers identify spam (to exclude it from searches) and expel spammers.

Identifying countries and languages
- Tag countries and languages separately, e.g. oa.argentina and oa.spanish, even if they're very similar, e.g. oa.spain and oa.spanish.

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

If you maintain a web page that links to an OATP tag library:
- Make sure that the entry for that tag on the tags page mentions your link to the tag library. 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 primary project feed (HTML edition): http://tagteam.harvard.edu/remix/oatp .
- To link to the tag library for a given tag: http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/3/tag/TAG . For example: http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/3/tag/oa.policies .