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 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.

• OATP has a powerful search engine, and stores every item ever tagged for OATP.
• 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 are not logged in.
• 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.)
• To learn the ropes of the powerful TagTeam search engine, 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.
  • We can hope that many of the works relevant to your research have already been tagged. In those cases, make sure they were well-tagged, and add any missing tags.
  • 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.

Share links to relevant tag libraries

• Remember that OATP tries to have a tag for every major OA-related subtopic, that every tag creates a tag library (list of items tagged with that tag), and that every tag library has a unique URL. Hence, when OA taggers have been good about tagging relevant work, these tag libraries are very comprehensive, and sharing the link to a given tag library is a fast way to share a comprehensive collection of items on that OA-related subtopic.
• For example, if you're in an online discussion, and someone asks how to find work on OA books, you can the link to the oa.books tag library. The link points to a web page listing all the items ever tagged with oa.books for OATP.
• 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 could help enlarge those tag libraries in time to help your project.
• Because the tag library is updated in real time, while the URL remains unchanged, your readers will have one-click access to a dynamically updated collection of relevant resources. You'll be sharing both past and future resources on that topic.
• To link to a given tag library, 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.books, link to this URL http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/oa.books.
• If you want to share a more complex collection (not just items about OA books, but OA books in biology), you can do that too. OATP provides unique URLs for each individual tag library, remix feed, and search. For some of these unique URLs, see the "How-can-I-deep-link-to..." section of our FAQ.
• Note that to link to relevant OATP tag libraries, remix feeds, or searches, you needn't be an OATP tagger.

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 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 your research is done and you put it online, then tag it for OATP. That will publicize it to the whole OA community. It will also make it discoverable to future researchers who run OATP searches.
• If you weren't already an OATP tagger during your research, you'll need to become an OATP tagger at this step in order to tag your finished work.
• Of course making your finished work OA is better than putting it behind a paywall. However, tagging your finished work is possible even if the online version of the work is paywalled. When you tag a paywalled work, and still make it more discoverable, especially to members of the OA community.
• Don't merely tag your finished articles and books. Tag your theses, dissertations, slide decks, blog posts, wiki pages, and datasets. If any of your research outputs pertain to OA, then they should be tagged for OATP, and if they are, then they'll be seen by the OA community.

Share your recommended readings.

• If you're an expert on OA, or a certain aspect of OA, we can hope that all the news in the area of your expertise is already being tagged for OATP — perhaps with your help. But if you want to highlight and recommend a subset of those items, you can create a special feed for your recommendations.
  • First pick a tag for the items you want to recommend. Let's say that your username is Zizi and that you pick zizi-rec to be the tag for the items you recommend.
  • You could simply use the tag feed for zizi-rec, namely, http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/zizi-rec. But remember that any user can use any tag. Hence, others might use zizi-rec (in good faith or bad). At best, this would dilute your recommendations with theirs. At worst, some of their additions might embarrass you.
  • To create a feed limited to the items you personally tag with zizi-rec, see our FAQ entry on how to deep-link to all items tagged with a given tag by a given tagger. In this case, the feed URL would be http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/user/zizi/tag/zizi-rec. This works because TagTeam knows which users add which tags, and limits this feed to items tagged with zizi-rec by user Zizi.
  • This method works whether you want to recommend works broadly, on any aspect of OA, or narrowly, for example, on OA in your field, OA in your country or region, or some aspect of OA such as OA and copyright, OA policies, OA business models, OA for books, OA for early career researchers, OA in the global south, and so on.
  • It works for real-time tagging (when you find something new you'd like to recommend) and for retroactive tagging (when you find something older you'd like to recommend).
  • It works whether the recommender is an individual or a group. There are at least three ways to make this work for a group:
    • The group can designate one member to tag the works the group recommends.
    • The group can designate several members to tag recommended works, and create a remix feed combining their separate recommendation feeds.
    • The group can share a single TagTeam account and login.
  • This method is a good way to help readers cope with information overload. If the Primary OATP feed is too voluminous, and one or more good taggers are recommending what they consider to be the best of the new OA developments, then readers who trust them could subscribe to one or more of their feeds rather than to the whole Primary OA feed.
  • Remember that every OATP feed has a unique URL. Once you create your recommendation feed, share the URL widely — for example, on your profile pages, on your blog, on social media, in your email sig.
    • By default TagTeam makes every feed available in RSS, Atom, and JSONP. If those aren't enough for you, then use online tools to convert the RSS feed to an email feed, Twitter feed, Google+ feed, and so on.
    • Recruit readers to follow your feed, and amplify your impact.

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.