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Open Access Tracking Project: The most comprehensive tool to stay up to date with the most recent Open Access developments

Peter Suber -  Harvard University and Nancy Pontika - The Open University

Abstract:
The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) is a crowd-sourced project, aiming to provide a comprehensive Open Science (OS) feed, covering all OS subtopics, in all academic fields and regions of the world and in all languages. 

The project aims to tag new OS developments and disseminates this information to the end user in eight different types of feeds: 1) HTML, 2) RSS feed, 3) Atom, 4) JSONP, 5) Email, 6) Twitter, 7) PushBullet, and 8) Reddit. The OATP is the most comprehensive and easy to use tool where the whole OS community can contribute with tagging and capturing the open scholarly communications developments in open access, funders’ policies, copyright and open licenses, open data, research data management, and open tools and infrastructures, etc. 

Currently 80 taggers have tagged more than 77000 items in the OATP offering a comprehensive list of news items with self-sufficient summaries from experts, occasional comments, links to relevant developments and a searchable archive. Each tagged item offers also record metadata information, such as the date of the tag and the name of the tagger, while the tagged items range from blog posts, discussion forums, newspaper articles, open access books, journal articles, YouTube videos and many more. 

The OATP though is not merely an alert service, but also a classification system; it enables users to classify OS developments even when they are not new. The two most important facts about these "subtopic tags" is that they are all optional and they are all user-defined, which helps users track new items on the subtopics they care about. 

The OATP calls the OS community to become an OATP tagger by capturing OS related information that takes place in their own fields, countries and languages. 

WHEN

  • 18th September, 11:30 - Demo presentations (2 min.)
  • 18th September, 12:00 - Demo sessions (20 min. x 3)

See full programme here.