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).

• Project conventions are decisions, agreements, or guidelines among the participants on how to carry out the project. For suggestions on how to help or be helped by the project, see the page on project tips.

Taggable items

• New 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.
  • To tag older items, use any relevant subtopic tags. Just remember to omit oa.new.

• On-topic and 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").

• Best 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 and non-OA versions
  • Tag relevant items whether or not they are 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.
  • 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).

• 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.

• Languages
  • OATP wants to cover OA news and comment worldwide, in every language. However, OATP itself is an English-language project. Hence, when you tag a non-English item for OATP, you should use English-language tags, even if you also use non-English tags, for example oa.new and oa.nouveau. Descriptions (excerpts, paraphrases, translations) should always be in English.
  • When you tag an item not written in English, please include the appropriate language tag, e.g. oa.french, oa.german, oa.hindi, or oa.italian. Note that nation and language tags are separate, and should be used together, e.g. oa.france and oa.french or oa.argentina and oa.spanish.

• Duplicates
  • Before OATP moved to TagTeam, we had to encourage taggers to avoid tagging items already tagged. One virtue of TagTeam is that we no longer have to do that. If you tag an item with oa.new (or any other project tag), when someone else had already tagged that item with that tag, then the item will appear only once in the feed for that tag.
  • TagTeam only considers items to be duplicates if they have the same URL. Hence, it's possible for duplicates to appear in the feed if they have different URLs. But it's not worth the trouble to run a TagTeam search check for the presence of a given item before tagging it. If you want to be conscientious, however, it would help to delete unnecessary parameters from a URL before tagging a page. The more users who do that, the fewer duplicates we'll have in our feeds and search results.

Tag guidelines

• Primary and secondary tags
  • OATP has only one primary tag, oa.new (above), which we use for all new items. We use this tag for any (new) OA-related development, regardless of the field, language, country, or aspect of OA.
  • 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 for new 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.
    • If a news story 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 named incidentally, then don't tag it by country. The same is true for news about OA in a certain field (e.g. "oa.anthropology", "oa.biology", "oa.chemistry").

• User-defined tags
  • Feel free, but not obliged, to add new user-defined tags as you go. But don't use a user-defined tag when there's 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.abcdef").
  • 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, we can automatically convert different tags for the same topic into the same tag. For example, TagTeam automatically converts "oa.monographs" into "oa.books".

• 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 the abstract.
  • If the piece doesn't have an abstract, then quote or paraphrase one of the more OA-relevant passages. Finding a pertinent passage will really help OATP readers. If there are several pertinent passages, feel free to include them all, 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.
  • 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.
  • All descriptions should be in English. OATP aims to cover news and developments in all countries and languages, but aims to do so in English.
    • If the tagged work is not in English, then the description should be the tagger's summary or paraphrase, the tagger's translation, or a machine translation.
    • User-defined tags need not be in English. For example, if an article is about OA for books, then use the English tag "oa.books", but feel free to add non-English tags as well, such as "oa.libros", "oa.livres", or "oa.buecher".
    • When the tagged item is not in English, always use a tag for the original language, in addition to a tag for the original nation ("oa.french" in addition to "oa.france").
    • If you use Google Translate or an equivalent to generate a 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: "

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 to use 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.