This resource is based on the original created by Jon Tennant and Ross Mounce.

This glossary is designed to help to inform people about the culture of “open research”. It was written by the community, for the community, and depends on the community to stay current.

Core Definitions underlying Open Research

Scholarly publishing

Journal or publication Types

  • Book - AA medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover; Source.

  • Epub - A free and open e-book standard by the International Digital publishing Forum.

  • Hybrid journal - Some traditional journals offer an option for authors to make their individual articles freely accessible to anyone worldwide, for an additional fee. All other articles in the journal remain accessible only through subscription; Source.

  • Journal - An aggregation of published research articles, either digital or printed or both. Historically divided into volumes and issues.

  • Megajournal - A journal with editorial criteria based on scientific soundness instead of a priori estimated newsworthiness or “impact”. They typically cover all research disciplines.

  • Monograph - A specialist work of writing or exhibition on a single subject or an aspect of a subject, often by a single author or artist, and usually on a scholarly subject; Source.

  • Open Access journal - A journal that exclusively comprises Open Access articles.

  • Overlay journals - An OA journal that does not produce its own content, but selects and curates groups of articles that are already freely available online. An example of this is Discrete Analysis; Source.

Types of work often made Open Access

  • Accepted author manuscript (AAM) - The version of a manuscript that has been formally accepted by a publisher for publication.

  • Eprint - A digital version of a research document available online within a repository.

  • Journal to Wiki publication (J2W) - Copying text from a published paper to a wiki (such as Wikipedia or Wikibooks), with attribution: legally possible if the licence of the paper is less restrictive than the licence of the wiki.

  • Postprint - A manuscript draft after it has been peer reviewed, but before it has undergone further modification by a publisher.

  • Preprint - A manuscript draft that has not yet been subject to formal peer review, distributed to receive early feedback on research from peers.

  • Preregistration- The practice of registering a scientific study before it is conducted. Preregistration of studies serves to prevent publication bias and reduce data dredging. It arose as a means to address the replication crisis. Pregistration requires the submission of a registered report, which is then accepted for publication or rejected by a journal based on theoretical justification, experimental design, and the proposed statistical analysis; Source.

  • Registered Reports - A type of publication in which peer review of the suggested methods and protocol is completed prior to data collection and analysis. Accepted papers then are guaranteed publication in the journal if the authors follow through with the registered methodology; Source.

  • Version of Record (VOR) - The final published version of a manuscript in a journal, after peer review and processing by a publisher.

  • Wiki to Journal publication (W2J) - Creating a paper on a wiki, using its features for collaboration and informal review, for submission to a journal for formal peer review. Might involve a public wiki such as Wikipedia or Wikiversity, or a specially-created wiki.

‘Flavours’ or ‘types’ of Open Access

  • Black - Refers to the illegal/illicit sharing of copies of research articles via channels such as ResearchGate or Sci-Hub. “Black as in the classical pirate flag, or in black market!”; Source.

  • Bronze - Delayed OA journals publish articles initially as subscription-only, then release them as free to read (but not to reuse, adapt and share, so not open access), typically after an embargo period (varying from months to years). In this way subscribers get early access to content and it is not licensed for reuse; Source.

  • Diamond - A form of “Gold” OA in which there is no author-facing fee (APC). Sometimes also called ‘Platinum’ OA.

  • Gold - Making the final version of manuscript (VOR) freely available immediately upon publication by the publisher.

  • Green - Making a version of the manuscript freely available in a repository. Often referred to as ‘self-archiving’, and happens in parallel with publication in a journal.

  • Gratis - A paper is available to read free-of-charge, though its reuse is still restricted, for example by “All Rights Reserved” or" copyright; Source.

  • Libre - A paper is made available under an open licence, allowing it to be shared and reused, depending on which licence is used; Source). Both ‘Libre’ and ‘Gratis’ refer to copyright and licensing restrictions. The difference is often alluded to with the slogan, “Free as in beer, not as in speech.”

Declarations And Principles

Peer Review

Assessment And Metrics

Organisations

Open Research Infrastructure

  • AmeliCA - A communication infrastructure for scholarly publishing and open science. Sustained cooperatively this initiative focuses on a non-profit publishing model to preserve the scholarly and open nature of scientific communication; Source.

  • Connecting Repositories (CORE) - A collection of OA repositories; Source.

  • Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) - An international association that brings together individual repositories and repository networks in order to build capacity, align policies and practices, and act as a global voice for the repository community; Source.

  • DARIAH - A pan-european infrastructure for arts and humanities scholars working with computational methods. It supports digital research as well as the teaching of digital research methods; Source.

  • Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) - A directory of academic OA repositories. Also has a search function for repositories and repository contents; Source.

  • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - A directory indexing OA peer-reviewed journals; Source.

  • Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) - A directory indexing open access peer-reviewed books; Source.

  • Europe PubMed Central (EuroPMC) - Based on PubMed Central, and part of a network of repositories supported by funders of life sciences and biomedical research; Source.

  • FOSTER - An e-learning platform that brings together the best training resources addressed to those who need to know more about Open Science, or need to develop strategies and skills for implementing Open Science practices in their daily workflows; Source.

  • OpenAIRE - A pan-European infrastructure that supports the European Commision’s OA Mandate in Horizon2020. All publications funded by the EC should be made available in Open Access and OpenAIRE harvests from a range of data sources namely repositories, OA publishers. (Source)

  • OpenUP - An open, dynamic and collaborative knowledge environment that systematically captures, organizes and categorizes research outcomes, best practices, tools and guidelines; Source.

  • Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Science and Humanities (OPERAS) - A project to coordinate and pool university-led scholarly communication activities in Europe in the Social Sciences and Humanities, in view of enabling Open Science as the standard practice.

  • PubMed - A repository comprising more than 24 million citations for the biomedical literature; Source.

  • PubMed Central (PMC) - A free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the US National Institutes of Health’s Library of Medicine; Source.

  • Repository 66 - A mash-up of data from ROAR and OpenDOAR overlayed onto Google maps; Source.

  • Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y El Caribe, España y Portugal (REDALYC) - A bibliographic database and a digital library of Open Access journals, supported by the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México with the help of numerous other higher education institutions and information systems; Source.

  • Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) - A registry for OA repositories, hosted by the University of Southampton, UK; Source.

  • Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) - A programme started in Brazil in 1998 which has now expanded to 15 other countries, developed by FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) and BIREME (Centro Latino-americano e do Caribe em Informação em Ciências da Saúde). The objectives are to develop a common methodology for the preparation, storage and dissemination of scientific literature, including standardized evaluation and quality control processes. This comprises a model for cooperative electronic publication of scientific periodicals on the internet using organised bibliographic databases with full text access; Source, in Portuguese and in English.

  • Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access - Rights of MEtadata for Open archiving (SHERPA-RoMEO) - A tool to check what the self-archiving policies for individual journals are; Source.

Advocacy organisations

  • Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) - Represents the interests of OA journal and book publishers in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines; Source.

  • Right to Research Coalition (R2RC) - Founded by students in the summer of 2009 to promote an open scholarly publishing system based on the belief that no student should be denied access to the articles they need because their institution cannot afford the often high cost of access. Since its launch, the Coalition has grown to represent nearly 7 million students internationally and counts among its members the largest student organizations in both the United States and Canada. While the Coalition currently has a strong base in North America, it is by no means solely a North American organization and is expanding to incorporate student organizations from around the world; Source.

  • Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) - An international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. Primarily based in the USA, but now with branches in Europe, South Africa, and Japan.

Tools and platforms

Formats, identifiers and standards

  • Comma-Separated Values, or Character-Separated Values (CSV) - A plain-text (non-binary) format for tabular data.

  • Digital Object Identifier (DOI) - A unique text string that is used to identify digital objects such as journal articles or OSS releases; Source.

  • Extensible Markup Language (XML) - A language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is readable by both machines and humans; Source.

  • Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) - The set of markup symbols or codes inserted in a file intended for display on a browser page; Source.

  • Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) - A common XML format in which publishers and archives can exchange journal content; Source.

  • LaTeX - A markup language for typesetting documents, particularly common in mathematics and the sciences. Many academic journals accept submissions in LaTeX; Source.

  • Machine readable - Data or metadata in a format that can be understood by a computer.

  • Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC) - A set of digital formats for the description of items catalogued by libraries; Source.

  • Markdown - A syntax for adding formatting to documents allowing correctly formatted articles to be written in plain text; Source.

  • Open Archives Initiative (OAI) - Develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content; Source.

  • ORCID - A persistent digital identifier that distinguishes individual researchers. Also supports integration in research workflows; Source.

  • ResearcherID - Assigns a unique identifier for researchers to manager publication lists, track citations, and avoid author mis-identification; Source.

  • Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) - A format for images that is open rather than tied to particular software, resolution-independent (unlike GIF, PNG and JPG), and structured so that with appropriate software it is relatively easy, for example, to translate labels into different languages.

  • Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) - A string of characters used to identify a name of a resource to enable its digital and networked representation and interaction; Source.

Services and service providers

  • AnnotatorJS / Hypothes.is - A framework and application for annotating resources online according to an emerging W3C standard for web annotations. Focus is on scholarly applications; Source Annotator and Source Hypothes.is.

  • Athens - A sign-in system that provides access to library resources; Source.

  • Bitbucket - Free source code hosting site; Source.

  • Center for Open Science - A non-profit technology organization with a mission to increase the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. Brian Nosek and Jeffrey Spies founded the organization in January 2013, funded mainly by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and others, after implementation and use of the Open Science Framework (OSF); Source.

  • CrossRef - An association of scholarly publishers that develops shared infrastructure to support more effective scholarly communication; Source.

  • Dissem.in - An online tool that detects papers behind paywalls and invites their authors to upload them in one click to an open repository; Source.

  • DSpace - Software for digital open repositories launched by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002; Source.

  • Eprints - Software for open digital repositories to self-archiving launched by Southampton University in 2000; Source.

  • Etherpad - An online, OSS collaborative writing/editing tool operating in real time; Source.

  • Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (FEDORA) - Software for digital repositories launched by The Cornell and Virginia Universities in 2003; Source.

  • Git - An OSS distributed revision control system; Source.

  • GitHub - A web-based service that provides a source code repository that works exclusively with the Git command-line tool; Source.

  • Google Scholar - A freely accessible search engine for indexing the scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines; Source.

  • IPython notebook - A web-based interactive computational environment where you can combine code execution, text, mathematics, plots and rich media into a single document; Source.

  • OAI Media Importer Bot - A computer program, run by Daniel Mietchen, that takes figures and video clips from OA articles in PubMed, and copies them to Wikimedia Commons with full attribution of the original paper. This facilitates the reuse of those files in educational materials or Wikipedia articles.

  • Open Access Button - Tracks global encounters with paywalls, and helps provide access to papers through a ‘wishlist’; Source.

  • Open Archives Initiative - Supplies a common framework to web communities that allows them to gain access to content in a standard manner by means of metadata harvesting; Source.

  • Open Conference Systems (OCS) - A free Web publishing tool that will create a complete Web presence for scholarly conferences; Source.

  • Open Harvester Systems - A free metadata indexing system; Source.

  • Open Journal Systems (OJS) - A journal management and publishing system; Source.

  • Open Monograph Press - An OSS platform for managing the editorial workflow required to see monographs, edited volumes, and scholarly editions through internal and external review, editing, cataloguing, production and publication; Source.

  • Our Research - A company that specialises in building and maintaining open-source, open-data tools to help power the Open Science revolution; Source.

  • Paperity - A multidisciplinary aggregator of OA journals and papers, Gold and Hybrid. Aims to include ultimately 100% of OA literature; Source.

  • Protocols.IO - Up-to-date crowd-sourced protocol repository; Source.

  • Publish or Perish - Software for retrieving and analyzing academic citations; Source.

  • ScienceOpen - A discovery platform with interactive features for scholars to enhance their research in the open, make an impact, and receive credit for it; Source.

  • Shibboleth - A single sign-in system for computer networks and services on the open Internet; Source.

  • Stack Overflow - A Question and Answer site for programming issues; Source.

  • Symplectic - A world-leading products and services company specialized in research information management. Their flagship system, Elements, is used by a number of the world’s research institutions; Source.

  • Zotero - A free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials (such as PDF files). Notable features include web browser integration, online syncing, generation of in-text citations, footnotes, and bibliographies, as well as integration with the word processors Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, and Google Docs. It is produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; Source.

Data Repositories

  • Databib - A searchable registry of research data repositories; Source. Note that the Databib and re3data.org registries merged at the end of 2015.

  • DataONE - A framework and infrastructure for Earth observational data; Source.

  • Dryad - A curated resource that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable; Source.

  • Figshare - A repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable, and discoverable manner; Source.

  • Genbank - The NIH sequence database comprising an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences. Part of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration; Source.

  • Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) - Contains data about all types of life on Earth, published according to common data standards; Source.

  • Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) - A network for the discoverability, access, and interpretation of complex ecological data; Source.

  • Morphbank - An image database documenting a range of specimen-based research, including comparative anatomy and taxonomy. Funded by the National Science Foundation; Source.

  • Morphobank - A Web application for collaborative evolutionary research, specifically phylogenetic systematics or cladistics, involving morphology; Source.

  • Open Access Directory Data Repositories - A list of repositories or databases relating to Open Data. Organised by field subject; Source.

  • Open Science Framework - A tool created by the Center for Open Science for researchers. It is both a research and workflow management tool and open repository. Their goal is to link up the entire research ecosystem, from conception through publication. They give the user full control over the openness of their work and allow for the creation of registrations, which can be used when submitting registered reports; Source.

  • re3data.org - A global registry of research data repositories from different academic disciplines; Source.

  • Registry of Research Data Repositories - An Open Science tool that serves as a global registry of research data repositories; Source.

  • UniProt - Central repository of protein sequence and annotation data; Source.

  • Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB) - Publicly available repository of macromolecular structural data; Source.

  • Zenodo - An all-purpose free to use repository for all research outputs, with DOIs and flexible licensing; Source.

Miscellaneous

Additional Resources