OATP FAQ

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

• This FAQ has been rewritten to reflect the transition of OATP from its old platform, Connotea, to its new platform, TagTeam. But so far it only covers the basics. We'll enlarge it over time.

How do I get started as an OATP reader?

• To get started as a reader, just start reading the primary project feed.

• You can subscribe to the primary feed in many different formats, including RSS, Atom, JSONP, Email, Twitter, Google+, and Pushbullet. If you don't want to subscribe to anything, then just bookmark the HTML edition, which is organized like a blog, and visit periodically to catch up.

How do I get started as an OATP tagger?

• To get started as a tagger (someone who helps build the feeds for readers), see our new page on getting started as an OATP tagger.

What's in the primary project feed?

• The primary project feed aims to include all new OA developments in all fields and regions. In practice, it includes the new OA developments noticed and tagged by participating taggers.

• We already do a pretty good job in meeting the goal. But we could do better if we had more taggers, especially in countries, languages, fields, and niches not already well-covered. If you want to help out, consider becoming an OATP tagger.

What's in the secondary project feeds?

• The secondary feeds include 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 or oa.brazil or oa.business_models or any other project tag. You can even create a remix feed consisting of any combination of project tags.

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?

• Subscribe the secondary feeds of your choice.

• If the primary feed is too voluminous, then try one or more secondary feeds. Instead of subscribing to the feed of all new OA developments, regardless of their subtopics, subscribe instead to feeds on just the OA subtopics you care about. You can subscribe to separate secondary feeds separately or you can braid them together into a single "remix" feed.

How do I search the tagged items?

• Use the TagTeam search engine for the OATP hub (at the bottom of the left sidebar). You needn't have a TagTeam account to do so. The search engine covers all OATP tag records back to the launch of the project in 2009.

• For more details, 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.

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. Now it 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 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 selected tags, see the section of the TagTeam manual on tag filters.

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

• First, you can search for it in OATP (see the earlier question on search). Second, if you're authorized to tag for OATP, then try to tag the item you're wondering about. If the tag form pops up blank, the item has not yet been tagged. If it pops up pre-populated with tags, then it has already been tagged. In the second case, you could withdraw, knowing that the item has already been tagged, or you could review the tags and add any new ones you think should be added.

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

• If you want to see whether a given tag is an approved or official project tag, look at the OATP list of approved tags. If you want to see whether it's ever been used at all, look it up in TagTeam's list of OATP tags. You could also insert the tag into this URL template, replacing the oa.policies tag, and look at the results: http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/oa.policies.

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", and 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 we wanted and we developed our own, TagTeam. For more background on TagTeam itself, and the features we wanted that didn't exist in other tagging platforms, see our Introduction to TagTeam.