Peter Suber launched the Open Access Tracking Project on April 16, and you can read a full description of it in this month's SPARC OA Newsletter.

I encourage anyone interested in contributing to the OATP to read the full description so as to make your contributions maximally useful. Here are the basics:

• the project runs on Connotea, using shared tags
• the only official tag right now is oa.new
• use the oa.new tag for developments from the past six months or so
• user-defined tags are encouraged and should use the same format: oa.foo, where foo can be any relevant subtopic

If you are pressed for time, and we all are, then it may help to have a Connotea bookmarklet with the oa.new tag (or oa.unclassified, if the item is older than six months) already filled in. That way you can just hit the bookmarklet, hit "add to my library" and be done. It's better if you have time to put in further classifying tags and a description, but at least this way the page will be recorded.

I guess the easiest way to do this would be to have three bookmarklets, the regular one and the "two click" bookmarklets I describe here. If you're using FireFox, here are the two-click versions; you can install them the same way as the regular one (drag to the toolbar) and, if you like, rename them using the "Organize Bookmarks" dialog box:

Connotea/oa.new

Connotea/oa.unclassified

This would obviously be better as a one-click than a two-click bookmarklet, but I failed dismally in my attempt to make it so because I don't actually know anything about javascript. I've previously suggested to the lazyweb that someone make a bookmarklet for another project, and nothing came of it; I'm hoping both that this little hack will be useful, and that it will inspire an actual programmer to improve it.