OATP FAQ

Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) » Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » FAQ

• Suggested short URL for this page = bit.ly/oatp-faq

How do I get started as an OATP reader?

• To get started as a reader, just go to the HTML version of the primary feed and start reading. It's organized like a blog with the most recent items at the top. And of course it's open access. Bookmark it and visit whenever you want to catch up.
  • You can also subscribe to the primary feed in many different formats, including RSS, Atom, JSON, Email, and Twitter. These subscriptions are free, of course.

How do I get started as an OATP tagger?

• See our page on getting started as an OATP tagger. Help build the feeds for our readers. Help fill our coverage gaps.

• If you're undecided, then also see our page on why to tag for OATP.

How does OA-related content make it into the OATP feeds?

• Not by automation! OATP depends entirely on its cadre of human taggers. When one of our taggers notices a piece of OA-related news or comment, and tags it, then it enters the OATP feeds. If our taggers don't notice a new item, or don't have time to tag it, then it doesn't enter our feeds.

• That's a reason to join us as a tagger and recruit others. It's a reason to have taggers in every academic field, country, region, and language, and taggers who follow new developments on every OA-related subtopic.

• One day we may supplement human tagging with automated tagging. But we're not there yet. Moreover, crowd-sourcing the job to humans who follow the fortunes of OA will always enrich the project — with items not otherwise easy to discover, with tags not otherwise obviously relevant, or both.

What's in the primary project feed?

• The goal of the primary project feed is to capture all developments (news and comment) on all aspects of OA in all academic fields in all languages in all parts of the world.

• The primary project feed consists of the items that are new (within the last six months) at the time of tagging, regardless of their subtopic. It's our most comprehensive feed. Reading it is the best way to stay on top of what's going on in the world of OA. Tagging for it is the best way to help the rest of the worldwide OA community stay on top of what's going on.

What's in the secondary project feeds?

• Secondary feeds could also be called subtopic feeds, since they focus on particular subtopics. OATP supports indefinitely many of them: one for each tag, one for each search, and one for each custom remix of our other feeds.

• Tag feeds are the most common secondary feeds, and they can cover every conceivable aspect of OA, such as OA developments in certain fields, in certain countries, or on certain subtopics. For example, you can subscribe to a feed of items tagged with oa.biology, oa.brazil, or oa.business_models, or oa.chemistry, oa.china, or oa.copyright.
  • To subscribe to an existing tag feed, see the (slowly growing) list of approved OATP tags.
  • To create a new tag feed, just create a new OATP tag. If you do this, you might also want to start tagging items that deserve the new tag, prospectively and retroactively, and recruit others to help out.

What sorts of things does OATP want to tag?

• Anything about OA, such as policies, news stories, scholarly articles, preprints, studies, surveys, reports, announcements, books, dissertations, datasets, calls for papers, funding opportunities, job ads, conferences, workshops, organizations, projects, tools, services, blog posts, slide presentations, videos, podcasts, wikis, FAQs. If an item is about OA (making it relevant), and if it's online with a unique URL (making it taggable), then we want to tag it, new or old, in any language, from any country, on any aspect of OA.

• If an item is not about OA, we don't tag it. We don't tag items just because they are OA.

• We construe "about OA" broadly and often tag items about scholarly communication.

• For more detail, see the OATP conventions, especially the section on taggable items.

The feeds are missing things. How can we make them more comprehensive?

• Become a tagger and tag items yourself. Recruit other taggers.

The feeds are too voluminous. How can we make them less comprehensive?

• The comprehensiveness of OATP is a strength, especially for searching and sharing what the project has already collected. If you think the primary feed is too voluminous, then take advantage of the OATP options to create more focused or selective feeds.
• Instead of subscribing to the primary feed of all new OA developments (combining all OA subtopics), subscribe to just the secondary feeds or customized feeds on the subtopics you care about.
  • For some ideas, see the FAQ entries below on deep-linking to OATP tag libraries covering specific subsets of the larger collection, for example, by keyword, tag, tagger, or boolean search results.
  • If you want to follow more than one subtopic, but not all subtopics, then you can create separate customized feeds for each topic you want to follow, and subscribe to each one separately. Or you can braid them together into a single "remix" feed. Or you can subscribe to the full feed minus any subtopics you wish to exclude.
  • You can create a selective or customized feed from any boolean search of the full collection. Here are some examples to get your imagination going: All items on OA in China. All items on OA in the global south. All items in French on OA in the humanities and social sciences. All items on privacy and OA medical research. All items on open data in astronomy. All items on green OA and early career researchers. All items on business models for OA books. All items new at the time of tagging except those about open textbooks.
  • To create your own links like the examples in the previous bullet, see the FAQ entry below on linking to a boolean combination of tags.
  • You can also create feeds based on what particular people tag. For example, all items tagged by user abernard102, or all items about open education resources tagged by user abernard102

• Subscribe to the feed of items recommended by a person or organization you trust. Conversely, create a feed of items you recommend, and encourage others to subscribe to it rather than (or alongside) the full primary feed.
  • See our instructions on how to create a recommendation feed.
  • If you set up a recommendation feed, let us know. We're thinking about creating a page of recommendation feeds to help readers choose among different perspectives on the OA-related news most worth reading.

How do I search the tagged items?

• Use the TagTeam search engine for the OATP hub. You can find it at the bottom of the left sidebar on the OATP home page.
  • To run searches, you needn't have a TagTeam account and needn't be a member of the OATP hub.
  • The search engine covers all OATP tag records back to the launch of the project in 2009.

• For details on the search features and syntax, see the section of the TagTeam manual on searching. Preview: You can search tags, keywords, or both. You can run phrase searches, wildcard searches, or boolean searches. You can bookmark any search, create a new feed from the results of any search, or add the results of any search to a remix feed combining many different OATP feeds.

• If you use Chrome, you can search OATP directly from the omnibox (the search and URL bar). Go to Chrome Settings, then to Manage search engines. Scroll to the bottom of the page. In the Add a new search engine text field, enter something like "OATP" or "Open Access Tracking Project". In the keyword field, enter "oatp". In the URL field, enter http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/item_search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%s&commit=Go. Then click Done. (If this technique is new to you, you'll be happy to know that Chrome can do the same thing with any other site-specific search engines, such as those at Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, Wikipedia, and so on.) Once you've set this up and want to search OATP from Chrome, just enter "oatp [search string]" in the omnibox and Chrome will run the OATP search for you. This is fast and elegant. Because Chrome is harnessing the OATP internal search engine, your search string should use the same syntax you'd use with the OATP internal search engine. For example, to search for a tag like oa.policies, search for #oa.policies. You can also use quoted phrases, boolean operators, and so on.

Does OATP support user-defined tags?

• Yes. See the OATP tag syntax for details on creating new project tags.

• When OATP launched in 2009, it had only one official tag, oa.new. All the rest were user-defined, just as some college campuses wait to put in paved sidewalks until they see where students create unpaved footpaths. OATP now has a longer list of official tags, in effect codifying the usage of its users into a standard vocabulary. But it continues to support user-defined tags and always will.

• We developed TagTeam (the software underlying OATP) to support a vision of "folksonomy in, ontology out" and get the best of both worlds. As users introduce useful new tags, we can approve and recommend them, and add them to OATP's standard vocabulary. In addition, TagTeam lets us convert deprecated tags to approved tags, automatically, and OATP takes advantage of that power. For more detail on how TagTeam supports the automatic conversion of certain tags to other tags, see the section of the TagTeam manual on tag filters.

How can I tell whether an item has already been tagged?

• If you're authorized to tag for OATP, the easiest method is to try to tag the item you're wondering about. If the tag form pops up blank, the item has not already been tagged. If the form pops up pre-populated with tags, then the item has already been tagged. In the second case, you could withdraw, knowing that it's already tagged, or you could review it and add any relevant tags the previous taggers may have omitted.

• A slightly more difficult method, but one open to non-taggers, is to search for the item in OATP. (See the earlier question on search.)

How can I tell whether a tag is already in use?

• To see whether a given tag is an approved or official project tag, look at the OATP list of approved tags.

• To see whether it's ever been used, with or without official approval, click on the Tags tab, sort the tags alphabetically, and look for the one you have in mind.

• You could also append the tag to this root URL, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/, and look at the results. For example, to see whether oa.policies has ever been used, put this URL in your browser, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/oa.policies.
  • If the tag has been used, this URL will bring up the HTML version of the tag library (all the items tagged with that tag).
  • If it hasn't been used, you'll see this message, "We're sorry, but 'TAG' is not a tag for 'Open Access Tracking Project (OATP).'"

How can I find items to tag?

• Two preliminary notes:
  • If there were an easy way to find all and only work relevant to OA, then OATP would not be necessary. The easy ways tend to be over-inclusive or under-inclusive.
  • We're grateful for every level of tagging. It's enough to tag the items you happen to encounter, for example in your inbox, social-media feeds, reading, and research. You needn't go looking or make a special effort. But we're especially grateful to those who do make a special effort and run systematic searches. Here are some suggestions for that.

• Create a series of Google Alerts and/or Talkwalker Alerts. Compose a search, save it as an alert, and you'll be notified every day about new hits. In our experience, Google Alerts tends to err on the side of under-inclusion and Talkwalker Alerts on the side of over-inclusion. Hence, it can help to create the same alert on both services to avoid missing things.
  • On both services, your saved searches can be boolean, for example ["open access" AND (biology OR biomedicine OR medicine] or ["open science" OR "open data"] or [("open access" OR "open science") AND (copyright OR licenses OR "fair use" OR "public domain"]. Write as many as you like in order to capture all the subtopics you want to track and tag.
  • If you use Gmail, create a Gmail label for these alerts, and create a Gmail filter to add the label to each incoming alert. That will let you zoom in on the alerts and temporarily ignore your other messages. On days when you don't want to bothered, you can zoom in on the alerts and delete them all at once.
  • Don't forget that many irrelevant items will use your keywords and many relevant ones will not.

• Find the journals that often publish the kinds of articles you'd like to tag. Sign up for alerts by email or RSS. Do the same with blogs that often post the kinds of pieces you'd like to tag. Subscribe to listservs and discussion forums that often alert readers to the kinds of items (articles, blog posts, events, etc.) that you'd like to tag.

• Follow the Twitter feeds from OA-related projects and organizations. Or follow just the ones in the areas you care to track, for example, by academic field, nation, region, or language. Or follow tweets with the #openaccess tag.

• Use Website Watcher or a similar tool to alert you to changes in web sites you've already decided are relevant.

• If you do research on OA itself, make it a habit to see whether the OA-related works you use, and the OA-related works they cite, are already tagged for OATP. If they're not, then tag them. If they are, see whether you can add any relevant tags that the previous taggers omitted.

• Don't forget that even if you want to search systematically and tag everything in a certain niche, there are still some items you may omit.

• Don't forget that OATP values retroactive tagging as much as prospective or real-time tagging.

• If you're interested, contact Peter Suber for some older items not previously tagged. Tagging them retroactively is useful to the project, but doesn't put them in the primary feed received by subscribers. Hence, it's a safe way to learn how to tag and receive feedback. .

If an item has a bad tag, how can I fix it?

• If you're a tagger, then you have the power to modify or remove bad tags, for example tags that are irrelevant or misspelled. Here are three ways to do that.
  1. If you're in TagTeam viewing a list of tagged items (for example), click on the bad tag in the item where it doesn't belong. You'll see a pop-up menu. If you want to delete the tag, look at the "Delete" part of the menu and click "just this item". If you want to change the tag, look at the "Modify" part of the menu and click "just this item".
  2. Go to the tag record for that item in TagTeam. In the left sidebar, click on the option called Filters. On the next screen, click on the red button to delete a bad tag, or click on the black button to modify a bad tag. In both cases, you'll get a pop-up menu asking which tag in that item you'd like to delete or modify.
  3. Go to the original page on the web and act as if you wanted to tag it again. Click on your tagging bookmarklet. When the tagging window pops up, it will be pre-populated with all the tags already applied to that item. To the right of each tag is a fat, gray x. Click on the x next to a tag in order to remove that tag. Click on the tag itself for the option to modify it instead.

• OATP is like Wikipedia. You don't have to report errors to a central office. The solution most in the spirit of the project is to fix them yourself.

• If you're not an OATP tagger, then you can't fix bad tags yourself. You could report them to a tagger or become a tagger yourself.

• Also see our tagging guidelines on deleting tags.

How can I deep-link to the OATP library of…

...all items tagged with a given tag?

• Just append the tag to this root URL, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/. For example, to link to the tag library for oa.policies, link to this URL http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/oa.policies.

...all items tagged by a given tagger?

• Just append the tagger's TagTeam username to this root URL, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/user/. For example, to link to the tag library of user abernard102, link to this URL http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/user/abernard102.

...all items tagged with a given tag by a given tagger?

• Just replace TAG and USER in this URL template with the given tag and given tagger-username: http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/user/USER/tag/TAG. For example, to link to the tag library of all the items tagged with oa.policies by user abernard102, link to this URL http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/user/abernard102/tag/oa.policies.
• Among other things, this is how to create a recommendation feed, or a feed of items that you'd personally like to highlight or recommend.

...all items tagged on a given date?

• Just append the date in YYYY/MM/DD format to this root URL, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/by_date/. For example, to link to the tag library for December 1, 2016, link to this URL, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/by_date/2016/12/01.

...all items that come up in a certain search?

• Every OATP search has a unique URL. Fine-tune your search, and then save the URL from the word Permalink under the search box. This URL will point to the HTML edition of the search returns. If you prefer to save the URL of the RSS, Atom, or JSON feed for that search, then save the URL under those feed icons in the top right corner of the search page. Then share the URL at will.

...a boolean combination of tags?

• First run the boolean search of your choice. For instructions, see the section of the TagTeam manual on searching.
• After running your search, your browser bar will show a URL for the search. But it's pretty messy and unreadable. Click the Permalink button below the search bar and date fields. Now you'll see a tidy URL in your browser bar. But you're not done yet:
• Where the URL has "#" characters, replace them with "%23" strings. Use that modified URL to share the boolean search with others or to re-run it yourself.
  • We use the "#" character in searches because it designates tags. But we must swap it out in URLs because it means something else in URLs.
  • In a future version of TagTeam, the Permalink button will swap "#" for "%23" automatically. In the meantime, apologies for this bit of manual labor.
• For examples of links to boolean searches, see the FAQ entry above on how to make feeds less comprehensive or more selective.

More generally

• Also see the FAQ entry above on how to follow OA news selectively, or without subscribing to the high-volume OATP primary feed.

Are OATP collections static or dynamic?

• Dynamic. If you deep-link to an OATP library or feed, then people who click on the link later will get the up-to-date set of OATP items belonging to that collection (for example, items with a given tag or items that satisfy a given search). Hence, sharing the link to an OATP feed or tag library is a way to share a dynamic or continually-updated collection of resources on a specific topic.

• For example, if you often blog about OA in your field, or run a project on OA in your country, then you could link to the OATP library on OA in your field or OA in your country. Then you could work (perhaps with others) to tag relevant items make that OATP library as comprehensive as possible. While the OATP library becomes more and more useful, the URL doesn't change, and you can share the URL through social media, email, web pages, or footnotes.

How can I use OATP for research on OA itself?

• See our page on using OATP for research on OA.

How can volunteers help?

From their launch, the OATP feeds and database were built by a mix of volunteers and grant-funded taggers. But in September 2018 they entered an all-volunteer phase. Without enough good volunteer taggers, OATP will decline in quantity and quality. With enough good volunteers it could improve in both respects.

• Above all, tag for OATP.
  • See our pages on why and how.
  • Read about OATP's transition to an all-volunteer phase.
  • There are many ways to tag for OATP:

• Tag new items for OATP.
  • If you follow OA-related developments in a certain niche (by subtopic, academic field, region, or language), be sure they all make it to the OA community through our primary news feed. Tagging the items you notice is all it takes.
  • Or take it up a notch by searching systematically for new developments in that niche and tagging them.

• Tag older items for OATP.
  • Pick an OA subtopic you care about, perhaps because you work in it or you're doing research on it. As you search for work relevant to that subtopic, tag what you find, even when it's not new. Make the tags on that subtopic retroactively comprehensive.

• Improve the tag records for items already tagged.
  • When you try tagging an item that's already been tagged, the existing tags will show up in the tagging bookmarklet. See whether any important tags are missing. If so, just add them right there in the bookmarklet form.
  • Or follow the HTML version of the primary feed, which shows new items along with the tags applied to them so far. Do this to keep up to date. But at the same time, look for items that are inadequately tagged. When you find one, click through and improve the record by adding new tags or modifying existing tags.

• Recruit others to tag for OATP.
  • Help us make sure that every niche is well-covered. When you find a promising person, share our handout on how to get started.
  • Remember that a "promising person" doesn't have to tag on every aspect of OA. He/she could tag in a niche, like OA in a certain academic field, country, language, or subtopic. Nor does a "promising person" have to tag every day. Even periodic or sporadic tagging would help the cause.

• When you want to share a collection of works on a given OA subtopic, share the link to that OATP tag library.

• Use OATP to support your own research on OA.

• Translate one or more of the major OATP pages from English into another language.

• If you maintain a web page on OA (for example, an OA-related blog, or the site for an OA-related organization), use a widget to embed the OATP primary feed on the page. Or do the same for any other OATP feed, whether it's based on a tag, a tagger, or a search.

• When you use OATP, please cite it. This isn't to run up our citation tally, which we cannot easily measure and do not use. It's simply to spread the word about OATP, which could help recruit new taggers, which could improve our coverage.

What's the difference between OATP and TagTeam?

• OATP is a social-tagging project. Participants use tags for sharing new developments about OA and organizing knowledge of the field.

• TagTeam is software to support social-tagging projects. It calls these projects hubs. OATP is one hub within TagTeam.

• OATP could run on almost any tagging platform, and when it launched in 2009 it ran on Connotea. However, existing tagging platforms did not have all the features OATP needed, and we developed our own, TagTeam. For more background on TagTeam itself, and the features we wanted that didn't exist on other tagging platforms, see the TagTeam home page.

• While TagTeam was developed to meet the needs of OATP, it's now a general-purpose tool for open, social-tagging research projects on any topic.

What are the copyright and licensing terms for OATP data?

They are the same as those for other TagTeam data.

Who's behind OATP?

Peter Suber launched OATP in April 2009, and continues to manage it. In mid-2011, it became one of the initiatives overseen by the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP), directed by Suber. See the HOAP front page for the HOAP funders, project principals, project coordinators, research assistants, and software developers.