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 are more austere than articles or blog posts. For some purposes, these brief records are an advantage: they're easier to read or skim than an equal number of blog posts or articles. But for other purposes, they're a disadvantage: they contain less information than blog posts or articles.
  • 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.

• Searching
  • You can search the whole corpus of OATP tag records inside TagTeam. You needn't be a registered TagTeam user to do so.
  • Similarly, 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.

Tips for taggers

• Adding subtopic tags
  • If you see a new item related to OA, and time is very tight, tag it with oa.new and be on your way. However, we strongly encourage taggers to add relevant subtopic tags at the same time, such as oa.policies, oa.biology, oa.brazil, and oa.portuguese.
  • The use of subtopic tags greatly helps users who want to subscribe to specialized feeds or run effective searches on the OATP database in TagTeam.

• Adding descriptions
  • If your tagging platform allows you to add descriptions along with your tags, please add a brief excerpt or summary.
  • For a journal article with an abstract, paste in the whole abstract or key excerpts from the abstract.
  • Descriptions should be in English. When you tag an item not written in English, you can write in your own English translation of key excerpts, write in your own English-language summary or paraphrase, or cut/paste an excerpt from a machine translation service.
  • If your tagging platform distinguishes descriptions from comments (like Connotea, for example), then descriptions will appear in the TagTeam feeds and searches, but comments will not.

• Retroactive tagging
  • Remember that OATP was launched in April 2009. While the project encourages retroactive tagging, little has been done so far. Make it a habit to tag older items as you encounter them. 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.
  • If you systematically search for online articles on a certain subtopic of OA, and tag them with the relevant tag, then go to the OATP tags page and annotate that tag as "Retroactively comprehensive since about (date)." That will give users more confidence when using that tag to include or exclude items from searches.

• Fixing parsing errors
  • Your tagging platform will usually try to extract the title of the item you're tagging. But sometimes it will leave the title field blank. Sometimes it mistake the title of a journal for the title of a journal article, or mistake the title of a blog for the title of a blog post. In those cases, just type or cut/paste the proper title into the "title" field of the dialog box.

• Avoiding deprecated tags
  • As the project evolves, it upgrades some user-defined tags to approved or official project tags, and downgrades others to deprecated tags. For example, oa.ebooks is now deprecated in favor of oa.books. The page of project tags lists the approved project tags and indicates the deprecated tags (if any) they replace.
  • One tip for taggers is to use accepted tags rather than deprecated tags. In one sense, that tip is hardly necessary, since OATP uses the power of TagTeam to convert deprecated tags to approved tags automatically. On the other hand, if you tag for OATP, then you should know that this process is taking place. If you use deprecated tags in TagTeam itself, they will be changed. If you use them in another platform, they will remain unaffected but the TagTeam copies will be changed.

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

• 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 about OA is strongly critical, 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 oa.negative tag is for objections, obstacles, or setbacks to OA, not for low-quality work about OA.
  • Some tagging platforms offer a "comment" box in addition to a "description" box. If your platform does so, then your "description" should be neutral, but your "comment" can be highly opinionated.

• 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.spain and oa.spanish.

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): 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 .