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).

To share a suggested tag for the ‘’oa.books’’ OATP feed, please notify us and share the URL with the OABN via one of these two channels:

    • Twitter: By tagging the OABN twitter handle @oabooks and including the URL;
    • E-mail: By e-mailing the OABN at info@oabooksnetwork.org with the URL and subject header ‘’Suggested tag for the OATP’’.

One of the OABN coordinators will review the link and tag it if suitable.
Please do not expect to receive replies or confirmations of receipt from the OABN. To check whether your suggested link has been tagged, simply check the ‘’oa.books’’ feed within a few days.

More information about the OATP

If you would like more information about the OATP, watch our boOkmArks discussion with the founder of the OATP, Peter Suber (Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and the the Harvard Open Access Project, and Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society), and two active taggers, Milica Ševkušić (Librarian at the Institute of Technical Sciences of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, Serbia; Member of the Repository Development Team at the University of Belgrade Computer Centre; and EIFL Open Access Country Coordinator in Serbia) and Gary Price (librarian, writer and consultant).