Use OATP for research on OA

Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) » Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » Use OATP for research on OA

If you're researching some aspect of OA, OATP can help you. Our taggers have almost certainly tagged works that will be relevant to your research. We've tagged nearly everything relevant to OA since 2009 and our tag records are stored in TagTeam for boolean searching. In turn, you can help OATP. If you tag relevant works not already tagged, you'll make OATP more comprehensive and help researchers who use OATP after you.

Search OATP by tag and/or keyword.

• Every item ever tagged for OATP is stored for searching.
• You can find the search engine here, or in the OATP hub at the bottom of the left sidebar.
• You can run searches even if you don't have a TagTeam account or any permissions in the OATP hub.
• The search engine covers all OATP tag records back to the launch of the project in 2009. We're also tagging items retroactively, and the index now includes many items from before 2009.
• TagTeam has a very powerful search engine. To learn the ropes, see the section on searching in the TagTeam manual. 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.

Find the tags already in use that best fit your topic.

• As you find works relevant to your research, tag them. OATP is crowd-sourced; join the crowd!
  • For this, you'll need to become a tagger for OATP.
  • If you're working with a research team, get your team-members to help tag as well.
  • This tagging will help you find those works again, and help others who use OATP for searching.
  • Do your best to make those tags retroactively comprehensive, and tell us. Then we'll label them as retroactively comprehensive on our page of project tags.
  • See the FAQ for easy instructions on how to tell whether a tag is already in use.

• Link to relevant OATP tag libraries.
  • For this, you need not be an OATP tagger.
  • For example, if the tag library for oa.china is relevant, you can link to http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/oa.china. Because the tag library will be updated in real time, even after you publish your link, your readers will benefit from a permanently updated collection of relevant resources.
  • Don't forget that in OATP individual tag libraries, remix feeds, and searches all have feeds with unique URLs, and you can link to any or all of them in your work and online discussions.

Feel free to use idiosyncratic tags for your research projects.

• If you're named Baba and you're writing a dissertation on some aspect of OA, feel free to introduce a tag like baba-diss, or oa.baba-diss. Or for that matter, baba-diss-subtopic1, baba-diss-subtopic2, and so on. Not all OATP tags need be useful or even intelligible to other users.
• But if you do want to introduce tags that will be useful and intelligible to others, see the next section.

If some aspect of your topic doesn't yet have an OATP tag...

• Make up a good one. OATP supports user-defined tags. Then tell us about your tag and its intended use. We might adopt add it as an official project tag.
• Or consult with us and we can come up with a good one in light of the existing set of OATP tags.
• If you wonder whether OATP already has a tag for a certain meaning, ask us.

Once you know the tags relevant to your research project...

• Make those tags retroactively comprehensive. Tag all relevant works that you know about, old or new. Because you're doing a research project on your topic, you're likely to encounter all or most of the works worth tagging on that topic.
• When those tags are retroactively comprehensive, tell us and we'll say so on our page of project tags.

Share your work.

• When you're done and your work is online somewhere (OA or not), tag it for OATP.
• Remember that every OATP tag publishes a feed, and every feed has a unique URL. Before or after you're done, share the URLs of the feeds from the tags most relevant to your topic. Cite these feeds in your work, but also share the URLs in emails, social media, and other publications.
• If you publicize your feeds, and and other people start to follow them, then when you discover and tag new items, you'll be alerting a whole research community, including members of your own research team. You'll also be making it easy to re-discover those items with an OATP search, or to generate the current list of them with a simple OATP feed URL.

Please cite OATP.

• If you use OATP in your research, please consider citing it. The more who know about OATP, the more who will tag for it and help make it more comprehensive and useful.
  • Full URL, OATP home page = https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Open_Access_Tracking_Project
  • Short URL, OATP home page = http://bit.ly/o-a-t-p.