Open Access Glossary

We use lots of terms which may be a little confusing here is a brief summary of each. Send additions and corrections to support@eprints.org


• AmSci
• September Forum
• September List
• American Scientist September98 Forum, The
The Forum dedicated to the discussion and planning of Open Access continuously since 1998.

• Author-Pays Model
The author pays the journal to publish their paper which is then freely available for anyone to download, copy, repoduce and distribute according to usual Open-Access rules.

• BOAI
• Budapest Open Access Initiative, The
The worldwide coordinated movement to make full-text online access to all peer-reviewed research free for all. Important note: BOAI and OAI are not the same thing, or one part of the other. BOAI and OAI do have similar goals. See also BOAI Homepage.

• document delivery
The supply, for retention, of a document ( journal article, book chapter etc) to a third party by means of copying, in compliance with all copyright regulations, and delivering it to the requester (by hand, post, electronically)

• EDD
• electronic document delivery
The supply, for retention, of a document ( journal article, book chapter etc) to a third party by means of scanning or, where permitted by publishers, from online versions in compliance with all copyright regulations, and delivering it to the requester by electronic transfer.

• eprint
• e-print
• EPrints

This causes some confusion as it is used to mean several things...

eprint/e-print:
An electronically published research paper (or other literary item).
EPrints:
  1. A project at the Department of Elecronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.
  2. Free software for producing an archive of eprints, provided by the project.

• eprints.org
This site. Sometimes used to refer to the EPrints Archive Software.

• eprint archive
An online archive of preprints and postprints. Possibly, but not necisarily, running our eprints software. See also this article.

• FOS
• Free Online Scholarship
  1. The Free Online Scholarship movement, better known as the "Open Access Movement".
  2. Generic term for scholarly literature in the sciences or humanities available free of charge on the internet. (See also: Open Access)

• Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter
An informal newsletter on developments in the migration of print scholarship to the internet, efforts to make online scholarship accessible to readers free of charge, and other FOS issues. Published sporadically by Peter Suber.

• Gold Open Access Publishing
• Gold Road
To publish articles in an open-access journal whenever a suitable one exists. See also Green OA Publishing.

• Green Open Access Publishing
• Green Road
To publish articles in a toll-access journal and also self-archive them in an open-access eprints archive. See also Gold OA Publishing.

• ILL
• inter-library loan
If a library does not have or subscribe to a book or journal article (in paper), it can borrow a copy, by reciprocal arrangement, from a cooperating library that does. For journals articles this usually means a photocopy, which includes the Copyright Clearance Centre charge, the photocopy charge, and the charge, if any, for the reciprocal ILL arrangement.

• OA
• Open Access
Something anyone can read (or view).

• OAI
• Open Archives Initiative, The
The Open Archives Initiative. From their mission statement "The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content."

• OAI-PMH
• OAI Protocol, The
• Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, The
The OAI protocol for metadata harvesting. A way for an archive to share it's metadata with harvesters which will offer searches across the data of many OAI-Compliant Archives.

• OAI compliant
An archive which has correctly implemented the OAI Protocol.

• postprint
The digital text of an article that has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by a journal. This includes
  1. the author's own final, revised, accepted digital draft
  2. the publisher's, edited, marked-up version, possibly in PDF
  3. any subsequent revised, corrected updates of the peer-reviewed final draft.
The watershed separating preprints from postprints is whether they are before or after peer-review and acceptance for publication. See also SELF-FAQ: What is an Eprint?

• preprint
The digital text of a paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by a journal. See also: SELF-FAQ: What is an Eprint?

• preprint archive
An EPrint Archive which only contains PrePrints.

• reprint
• offprint
A paper copy of a peer-reviewed, published article. Usually printed off by the publisher and given to or purchased by the author for distribution. Sometimes referes to the Inter-Library Loan or Copyright Clearance Centre photocopies of the published draft.
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