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 about OA since 2009 and the 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 OATP search engine here, or in the OATP hub at the bottom of the left sidebar.
• You can run OATP 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. (Tagging more items retroactively is one way you can help; more below.)
• TagTeam has a very powerful search engine. To learn the ropes, see the TagTeam FAQ or the section on searching in the TagTeam manual. Preview: You can search tags, keywords, or both in the same search. 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.

Tag the works you find.

• As you find works relevant to your research, or relevant to OA more broadly, tag them or make sure they're already tagged. OATP is crowd-sourced; join the crowd!
  • For this, you'll need to become an OATP tagger.
  • If you're working with a research team, get your team-members to tag for the project too.
  • This tagging will help you and your team find the tagged works again. It will help others who subscribe to the relevant tag feeds, and those who search OATP.
  • Do your best to 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.

Find or create the best tags for your OA-related subtopics.

• First see the OATP list of project-approved tags. All or many of your OA-related subtopics might already have project tags.
• Second, if some aspect of your topic doesn't yet have an OATP tag, make up a good one.
  • OATP supports user-defined tags.
  • Tell us about your tag and its intended use. We might adopt it as an official project tag.
  • Or consult with us and we can help you come up with a good one in light of the existing set of OATP tags, or we can help you figure out whether OATP already has a tag for a certain meaning.
  • See the FAQ on how to tell whether a given tag is already in use.
  • Feel free to create idiosyncratic tags for your research project. For example, if you're named Zizi and you're writing a dissertation on some aspect of OA, feel free to introduce a tag like zizi-diss, or oa.zizi-diss. Or for that matter, zizi-diss-subtopic1, zizi-diss-subtopic2, and so on. Not all OATP tags need be useful or even intelligible to other users.

Share your work.

• When you're done and your work is online somewhere (OA or not), tag it for OATP. This will publicize it to the whole OA community.
  • For this, you'll need to become an OATP tagger.
• Link to relevant OATP tag libraries. (For this you needn't be an OATP tagger.)
  • For example, if the tag library for oa.china is relevant to your work, 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 have one-click access to a dynamically updated collection of relevant resources.
  • Remember that every OATP tag publishes a feed, and that every feed has a unique URL. You can share the URLs in emails, social media, slides, articles, books, and other publications. You can also cite them in the finished version of your research project itself.
  • If you share these URLs after your work is done, and if you applied this tag in your research, then you help spread the word about what you've done. If share these URLs before your work is done, then other taggers might help you enlarge those tag libraries in time to help your project.
• Don't forget that in OATP individual tag libraries, remix feed, and searches all have feeds with unique URLs. You can link to any or all of them in your work and online discussions.

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.