Glossary
academic social network: networks for sharing research content such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu. Some publications shared are green or gold licensed, but many networks do not check for copyright compliance. As a result, academic social networks often serve to proliferate unlicensed content. Some are for profit whereas others are not.
acronyms: the world of open access is filled with acronyms for organisations, frameworks, consortia, infrastructure, and so on. Fortunately, SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) has provided a glossary of common acronyms: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/glossary.html.
article processing charge (APC): a supply-side (i.e. author-side, institution-side or funder-side) payment to publishers to cover the business costs of their work in order to achieve gold open access book processing charge (BPC): an ‘article processing charge’ for a book.
big deal: bundled journal subscriptions that offers savings when compared to á la carte prices. Libraries complain that journal publishers abuse their monopolies to charge inflated subscription prices. For a list of libraries that have cancelled big deals, see https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/.
black open access: illegally shared subscription articles on sites such as SciHub.
bronze open access: content made freely available on the websites of scholarly publishers (see ‘gratis open access’) but not openly licensed (see ‘libre open access’ and ‘Creative Commons licenses’).
CLOCKSS: a digital preservation initiative. Acronym for Controlled Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.
Creative Commons licenses: a series of licenses designed to allow greater reuse of material than is purely allowed under fair dealing/fair use provisions of copyright law digital preservation: the practice of ensuring the continued existence and accessibility of digital material. This often takes the form of decentralised, highly distributed and redundant dark-archive systems, such as CLOCKSS and LOCKSS.
delayed open access: an embargo period (usually up to two years) placed on a publication before it becomes freely available.
disciplinary repository: see ‘subject repository’.
Document Object Identifier (DOI): an identifier in the form 10.7766/orbit.v2.1.50 or http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/orbit.v2.1.50 that uniquely addresses a scholarly resource. The DOI system is part of the digital preservation infrastructure as, in the event that a journal goes offline or the publisher folds, the DOI is updated to point to the preserved version, ensuring continued access. A DOI is supposed to be an identifier that will always return the resource and it comes with substantial social structures (such as financial penalties if metadata are not kept up-todate) to ensure this.
double dipping: an instance when a hybrid journal that levies an article processing charge also charges for subscriptions without offsetting the subscription price to reflect revenue claimed from the APC embargo: a delay period required by some publishers before they will allow open access (green or gold) on a piece of work. The embargo period for journals that allow green OA can be found on the publisher’s website or by using the SHERPA/RoMEO tool.
FAIR principles: these principles state that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. A cornerstone of the growing open data movement.
gold open access: scholarly material made open access directly on the publisher’s website. NB gold open access does not refer to any specific business model.
gratis open access: open-access material that is free of charge to read but with no additional permissions granted to redistribute, reuse or modify. Some refer to this simply as ‘open access’.
green open access: scholarly material made open access by deposit in a repository. Note that green open access does not refer to any specific business model.
hybrid journal: a subscription journal that offers an open-access option.
institutional repository: an archival space hosted by a higher education institution to facilitate green open access.
legacy publisher: a term often used pejoratively to describe publishers who trace their origins to a 19th and 20th-century model of book and journal publishing, often used to differentiate from ‘new’ modes of scholarly communication. This term is used interchangeably with the more positive ‘traditional’ publishing or ‘trade’ publishing.
libre open access: open access that is free of charge and that has lowered permission barriers. Some use simply ‘open access’ to refer to this.
LOCKSS: a digital preservation initiative, acronym for Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe
mandate: a requirement that work be made open access, usually requested and enforced by a government, funding body or institution
metadata: peripheral information about an object, in this case a scholarly resource. For instance, author, affiliation, title, date published, journal name, issue, volume etc. are all pieces of metadata pertaining to a journal article.
offsetting agreement: a compensation by a publisher to an institution for the extra money they are putting into the system through payment of APCs. See ‘article processing charge (APC)’ and ‘double dipping’. See https://unlockingresearch-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?tag=offset-agreements.
open access (OA): the removal of price and permission barriers to research through the use of the internet and more liberal licensing agreements. See also ‘green open access’ and ‘gold open access’. For open access that distinguishes between the types of permission, see ‘gratis open access’ and ‘libre open access’. Together with ‘open data’, OA comes under the wider umbrella of ‘open science’.
open data: the free availability and reusability of data without restriction or copyright. See also ‘FAIR principles’ and ‘open science’.
open science: scientific research, data and dissemmination accessible to all by design. See also ‘open access (OA)’ and ‘open data’.
openwashing: having an appearance of open source and open licensing for marketing purposes, while continuing proprietary practices. See http://openwashing.org/.
platinum open access: a category-error term that supposedly denotes gold open access for which there is no author charge. In reality, this is just gold open access. See also ‘article processing charge’.
Portico: a digital preservation initiative
post-print: a manuscript that has passed peer review
pre-print: a manuscript that has not yet been peer-reviewed
repository: an archival space to facilitate green open access. See also ‘institutional repository’ and ‘subject repository’.
scholar-led: publishing initiatives founded and run by scholars. These initiatives tend to be small, not-for-profit, progressive, and focused on a specialist niche.
self-archiving: the process of an author making his or her work green open access by depositing the work in a repository
serials crisis: the growing inability of library budgets to keep up with the rapid inflation of subscription fees. This crisis has been ongoing since the 1980s.
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subject repository: an archival space hosted by a subject group or learned society to facilitate green open access toll-access journals: journals that charge a subscription or one-off fee for access
Zombie journal: an academic journal published by a commercial publisher that has lost the respect and support of its local community. Zombie journals are formed when editorial boards resign en masse from running a journal in response to anti-intellectual and commercial practices of the publisher. It is often followed by the launch of a new open access journal to which the academic community migrates, leaving behind the undead zombie title, a husk of its former self, an emblem of the acquisitive motives of unscrupulous commercial scholarly publishers. Related to vampire capitalism, which Karl Marx defined in Capital, Vol 1 as 'dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour'.