This glossary of terms and acronyms has been prepared to accompany the NIHR Open Access policy review stakeholder survey.
Accepted manuscript
Version of an article submitted by the author that has been through a peer-review process and accepted for publication
APC
Article Processing Charge: a publishing fee paid to journals to publish a research output open access
CC BY
Creative Commons attribution licence. This allows:
- sharing: copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format
- adapting: remixing, transforming and building upon the material for any purpose (including commercial reasons)
This type of licence requires:
- attribution: you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the licence and indicate if changes were made; you may do so in any reasonable manner but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use of the material
- you may not use the material for commercial purposes
See the Creative Commons website for further information.
CC BY-NC
Creative Commons attribution non-commercial licence. This allows:
- sharing: copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format
- adapting: remixing, transforming and building upon the material
This type of licence requires:
- attribution: you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the licence and indicate if changes were made; you may do so in any reasonable manner but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use of the material
- you may not use the material for commercial purposes
See the Creative Commons website for more information on non-commercial licences.
CC BY-ND
Creative Commons attribution no-derivatives licence. This allows:
- sharing: copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format for any purpose (including commercial reasons)
This type of licence requires:
- attribution: you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the licence and indicate if changes were made; you may do so in any reasonable manner but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use of the material
- if you remix, transform or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material
See the Creative Commons website for information on attribution no-directives licences for further information.
Copyright
Describes a bundle of rights, automatically assigned to the author by legislation in most countries. It provides the copyright owner exclusive rights to publish and distribute their work, and stops others from using it without the owner’s permission.
DHSC
Department of Health and Social Care: A department of Her Majesty's Government, responsible for government policy on health and adult social care matters in England.
Discoverable
The article can be found by readers and search engines, usually facilitated through a bibliographic or metadata record associated with the full text.
Edited collection
A collection of scholarly or scientific chapters written by different authors. The chapters in an edited volume are original works (not republished works).
Embargo
A period during which access to scholarly work is restricted to those who have paid for access. Once the embargo period ends, an article can be deposited in a repository (if permitted by the publisher).
Europe PMC
European PubMed Central: A permanent, free-to-access online digital repository which contains full-text preprints and peer-reviewed life sciences publications.
Executive summary
A short document or section of a document that summarises a longer report or proposal or a group of related reports in such a way that readers can rapidly become familiar with a large body of material without having to read it all.
Machine readability
Data (e.g. content of a document) that can be readily processed by computers.
Monograph
A long article or short book on a particular subject.
NIHR Journals Library
A set of freely available journals in which NIHR publishes comprehensive accounts of the research it has funded.
See the NIHR Journals Library website for more information.
Licence
The licence outlines what a person may do with a third party copyright work (e.g., a Creative Commons (CC) licence or Open Government licence).
Open Access (OA)
The online permanent availability of scholarly work via the internet, free of charge to individuals who wish to access, read and re-use.
Open Government Licence
A copyright licence for Crown Copyright works published by the UK government. It is compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.
Open research
Making research outputs, including publications, data, methodology, software, code, and materials freely available online in a way that is legal, ethical and economic.
Paywall
A method of restricting access to content, (e.g., research articles, news), via a purchase or a paid-for subscription.
Peer review
A reviewing process for checking the quality and importance of reports of research. An article submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal is reviewed by other experts in the area.
Pre-print
The first draft of an article, before peer-review, and possibly even before any contact with a publisher.
Research article
Describes the methods, results and conclusions of an original piece of research; it is usually published in a journal following peer-review.
Repository
An online archive of scholarly outputs (e.g., Europe PubMed Central). The collection can include publications in peer-reviewed journals, books and book-sections, technical reports, working papers, monographs, conference presentations, research data, audio and visual materials or any other research content that has some scholarly value.
Self-archive
The process of depositing research outputs to a repository along with bibliographic metadata (data that describes other data. For items in open access repositories, this usually consists of a full bibliographic reference, abstract, keywords and similar information).
Systematic review
A review of a clearly formulated question that uses systematic and explicit methods to identify, select, and critically appraise relevant research, and to collect and analyse data from the studies that are included in the review. Statistical methods (meta-analysis) may or may not be used to analyse and summarise the results of the included studies.
Transformative agreement
A contract that moves from subscription-based access to one where publishers are remunerated at a fair price for their OA publishing.