OATP tags by region
Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP) » Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » OATP tags » tags by region
- This page is temporarily closed to public edits while the project (1) works out methods for communal governance and (2) builds software to deal with approved and deprecated tags. To suggest edits to this page, contact Peter Suber.
- Also see our pages on OATP tags and OATP tagging conventions.
General tips on using region tags
- In the war between lumpers and splitters, OATP is on the lumper side. The official or project-approved tags for regions tend to be few in number and broad in scope.
- But OATP supports splitters by supporting user-defined tags.
- If it's important to say that a development occurred in a particular political division of a country, then build the tag from the national tag.
- For example, tags for the provinces of Canada are based on their official abbreviations, such as oa.canada.mb, oa.canada.nb, oa.canada.on.
- Tags for the states of India are based on their official abbreviations, such as oa.india.ap, oa.india.br, oa.india.cg.
- Tags for the states of the USA are based on the official postal abbreviations, such as oa.usa.fl, oa.usa.ga, oa.usa.hi.
- If you do use one of these political sub-division tags, also use the national tag (oa.canada, oa.india, oa.usa). That will help people searching for all OA developments in certain countries.
- If you tag an item with a region tag for a certain country (oa.algeria, oa.brazil, oa.china), then consider tagging the same item by continent as well (oa.africa, oa.south_america, oa.asia). That will help people searching for all OA developments in certain continents.
- If you're unsure what tag to use for a certain region, then feel free to invent a tag with the name you use for that region, oa.REGIONNAME.
- If you want, you could check to see whether or how often the tag you have in mind has already been used by OATP taggers. Just go to this URL http://tagteam.harvard.edu/hubs/oatp/tag/oa.REGIONNAME in your browser.
Obvious region tags
- We don't maintain a complete list of the tags for countries. The main reason is that there are so many of them, and that most are obvious, like oa.algeria, oa.brazil, and oa.china.
- We have tags for these continents: oa.africa, oa.antarctica, oa.asia, oa.australia, oa.europe, oa.north_america, oa.south_america.
- But different peoples count and name the continents differently. Don't hesitate to supplement this list with other tags, such as oa.afro-eurasia, oa.america, oa.australasia, oa.eurasia, oa.oceana.
Non-obvious region tags
For this purpose, all region names other than country names and continent names are non-obvious. The names may be well-known, but it's not obvious that they function as OATP tags.
Not all region names have already been used as OATP tags. But you could start at any time, e.g. with oa.apac [Asia-Pacific region], oa.asean [Association of Southeast Asian Nations], oa.brics [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa], oa.east_africa, oa.former_soviet_union, oa.levant, oa.maghreb, oa.mediterranean, oa.mint [Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey], oa.pacific_islands, oa.saarc [South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation]. Here are some region names that are already accepted OATP tags:
- oa.arab_world = for items about any part of the Arab world
- oa.mena = for items about the Middle East and North Africa
- oa.south = for items about the global south (sometimes called the third world, developing world, developing countries, or low- and middle-income countries [LMICs])