Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) – Tagging help by OABN

Background

The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP), is a crowd-sourced social tagging project that runs on open-source software. It harnesses the power of the community to capture news and comment on open access (OA) in every academic field and region of the world. We want to help expand its coverage of OA books — and you can help!

How

The OATP has two missions:

• • To create real-time alerts for OA-related developments, and
  • To organize knowledge of the field, by tag or subtopic, for easy searching and sharing.

The OATP publishes a large primary feed and hundreds of smaller secondary feeds – one of which (‘’oa.books’’) is a valuable resource for the OA book community. (It’s published alongside our blog posts, and provides valuable updates about developments and discussions related to OA books.)

There are two ways you can contribute to this feed.

1) Become a tagger yourself

If you are interested in tagging for the OATP, please have a look at this post, which explains the basics. Feel free to contact one of the OABN coordinators (info@oabooksnetwork.org) with any basic setup questions — all the coordinators have signed up, so they should be able to help you with any initial difficulties.

2) Ask the OABN

The OATP is a crowd-sourced project, depending on the ‘many eyeballs’ principle. The more contributors there are, from as many different backgrounds as possible, the better its coverage will be. However, lots of things might prevent you from becoming a tagger: for example, time constraints, a lack of technical expertise, or other restrictions.

The OABN coordinators would therefore be happy to tag online content related to open access books that is suggested by community members (to get a sense of the sorts of things that are currently tagged, see the OATP feed ‘’oa.books’’, which is published alongside our blog posts).