Use OATP for research on OA

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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 relevant to your research. We've tagged nearly everything about OA since our launch in 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 for relevant work.

  • 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 to OA more broadly, tag them. It just takes a few seconds.
    • 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.
  • Make the tags important to you and your work retroactively comprehensive.
    • For example, if you're researching OA in Brazil, you'll probably aim to find all the relevant web sites, articles, announcements, blog posts, and so on about OA in Brazil, old and new. If you tag them as you encounter them, then you can make the tag oa.brazil retroactively comprehensive.
    • This is even easier for a team of people working on a common research project. If the team members tag all the relevant items they find, old or new, they can quickly make those tags retroactively comprehensive.
    • If you think a tag has become retroactively comprehensive, please tell us and we'll we'll say so on our page of project tags. Since OATP launched in 2009, a growing number of our tags have become retroactively comprehensive.


OATP is crowd-sourced; join the crowd! OATP depends on the many-eyeballs principle; lend us your eyeballs! If you notice and tag things that other users haven't noticed or tagged, you'll make OATP more useful. If OATP is already comprehensive, it's thanks to users like you. If OATP is still missing things, we can only add them with the help of users like you.

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 to complement the existing 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.
  • 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 it with this URL, 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 share these URLs before your work is done, then other taggers might help enlarge those tag libraries in time to help your project.
  • Don't forget that OATP provides unique URLs for each individual tag library, remix feed, and search. You can link to any or all of them in your work and online discussions.

Please cite OATP.

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