Glossary

This is an acronym and term glossary, intended to help orient people who are new to open access, data curation, and librarianship. No pretense is made to objectivity in the definitions below.

ACS

The American Chemical Society, a disciplinary society notoriously hostile to all things open-access and open-data

ARL

Association of Research Libraries

BMC

BioMed Central, a major publisher of open-access journals

COPE

Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity, a group of academic libraries and funders vowing to set aside money to pay author-side open-access fees

DSpace

Software that powers many institutional repositories

EBSCO

A large subscription e-journal and journal-database aggregator

Gold open access (or "gold road")

Making an article open-access by publishing it in a journal that makes articles available online without charging readers (or reader-proxies such as libraries)

Green open access (or "green road")

Making an article open-access by placing some version of it (usually a preprint or postprint) in an online archive, such as a disciplinary or institutional repository

IR

Institutional repository, a digital archive often containing journal-article preprints and postprints, theses, dissertations, and other locally-produced scholarly and historical content

IRB

Institutional Review Board, a campus committee tasked with overseeing research to avoid harm to research subjects and help ensure ethical research practices

IT

"Information technology," often used as a placeholder for business or campus units that provide or control computation-based services

JISC

Meaningless acronym (used to stand for the Joint Information Systems Committee) for a UK higher-ed information-technology consortium (roughly analogous to Educause in the US, perhaps) that often weighs in on scholarly-communication issues

NIH

National Institutes of Health, a US government agency that funds immense amounts of medical research. Notable in our context for its Public Access Policy, a requirement that all papers arising from NIH-funded research be made available in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication.

NPG

Nature Publishing Group

NSF

National Science Foundation, a US government agency that funds immense amounts of scientific research. Notable in our context for instituting a requirement that all grant applications contain data-management plans as of January 2011.

OA

Open access

OAIS, OAIS model, OAIS reference model

Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System, a conceptual framework underlying the workings of many digital archives

Page charges

Per-page publication fees charged to article authors by many journals, including by journals that also charge for subscriptions

PI

Principal Investigator, the lead researcher on a grant-funded research project

PLoS

Public Library of Science, a major publisher of open-access journals

POD

"Print on demand," printing technology that makes printed material on-the-spot and just-in-time. An alternative to doing large "print runs" that may or may not sell through.

SCOAP3

Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, a consortium trying to "flip" all high-energy physics journals from a subscription-based to an open-access business model

SPARC

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, coordinates considerable activity around open access in the United States.

SSRN

Social Science Research Network, a disciplinary archive of preprints, postprints, and working papers from the social sciences

Subvention

In the humanities, money intended to underwrite publication of monographs that will not sell well enough to be published otherwise

UKSG

UK Serials Group, an organization of publishers and librarians around scholarly-communication issues