OATP tips

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.


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


 * 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.

Tips for taggers

 * All the items in this section have been moved to the section of tagging guidelines on our page of OATP conventions.

Tips for others

 * 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):.
 * To link to the tag library for a given tag:   .  For example:.