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Many terms used in scholarly communication are similar to, or the same as, those used in everyday life. This section defines commonly used terms.

Apollo

Apollo is the University of Cambridge’s institutional repository. It was established in 2002 as a service for storing and providing access to the outputs of Cambridge’s research activity. It is managed by Cambridge University Library.

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

The fee a publisher charges for making articles Open Access at the time of publication. This is not the same as 'page charges' or 'colour charges'.

Author Accepted Manuscript

The author's final, peer reviewed and corrected manuscript, usually created in Word, a publisher's template, or LaTeX, which incorporates any amendments based on the peer-reviewers' feedback, but before copyeditting and typesetting by the publisher.

COAF

The Charities Open Access Fund is now defunct, but refers to a partnership between six health research charities. The six charities were Bloodwise, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Parkinson's UK, Versus Arthritis, and Wellcome Trust.

cOAlition S

Launched in September 2018, it is a coalition of a group of funders whose aim is to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality. There is more information about cOAlition S on their website. cOAlition S developed 'Plan S' (see below). 

Closed Deposit

Some publishers' article-sharing policies allow authors to post copies of their articles in repositories, subject to an embargo period.  During the embargo period, the metadata of the article can be made available.  This is known as a closed deposit.  The REF Open Access policy allows for closed deposits, as long as the article itself is made available at the end of the embargo period.

Copyright

Copyright exists to protect the rights of the person(s) who has created a work and ensure that they receive due recognition for their contribution. Copyright gives the holder power over how the work is used, distributed and adapted for a set period of time. It is part of a group of rights which protect intellectual property whilst at the same time encouraging creativity in the creation of new material. You can have a look at other helpful information on copyright on the Office of Scholarly Communication website.

Date of publication

This is not as obvious as it first seems. According to Research England, the date of publication is 'the earliest date that the final Version of Record is made available on the publisher's website. This generally means that the 'early online date', rather than the print publication date, should be taken as the date of publication.

Diamond Open Access

Free and immediate access at the time of publication. Diamond open access papers can be considered to be 'born open access'. Diamond Open Access journals do not charge authors to publish because the costs are covered by sponsor(s). 

Embargo

The period during which an author’s research output is only available via the publisher’s journal/site; embargo periods differ from publisher to publisher; after the embargo period has ended, the research output (either the author’s accepted manuscript or the version of record) can be made freely available in Apollo.

Gold Open Access

Free and immediate access at the time of publication. Gold open access papers can be considered to be 'born open access'. Fully open access journals often (but not always) charge a fee for publication.

Green Open Access

Making a version of work (usually an author's accepted manuscript) available in an open access repository. These can be institutional such as Apollo the Cambridge repository or subject based, such as arXiv, PubMed Central, RePEc or SSRN. Placing work in ResearchGate or Academia.edu is not considered to be green open access. Green Open Access can be considered to be 'secondary Open Access'.

Hybrid journals

Hybrid journals are subscription journals that charge an extra fee to make a specific article Open Access while the remainder of the journal remains behind a paywall. This type of Gold Open Access is always accompanied by a fee.

Metadata

In the context of open access repositories, such as Apollo, the metadata of every deposit describes the research output, inlcuidng the type of output it is (journal article, conference paper, book chapter, etc.); the version (author's accepted version, or publisher's open access version); the publication date, publisher, DOI, licensing and copyright, embargo end date, if applicable, and so on.

Open Access

Open access is making research results freely available to anyone with an internet connection rather then keeping those results hidden behind a subscription paywall. 

Preprint

This is a term used for an early version of a research article. Preprints are often uploaded to preprint servers such as arXiv to be shared with colleagues and to receive comments. There can be several versions of a preprint as it is amended and worked on prior to submission to a journal. By its very definition, preprints are unrefereed works (i.e., they have not been through a formal peer-review process). We do not host preprints on Apollo.

Plan S

The fundamental principle of Plan S is that “all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo." The Plan also consists of a number of aims. More information can be found on the cOAlition S website. 

Postprint

The term postprint refers to the author's accepted manuscript, and they are used interchangeably.  However, because of the term's ambiguity, at Cambridge we will always refer to the peer-reviewed and corrected version of a manuscript as the author's accepted manuscript. 

REF

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. It is administered by Research England, which was formerly the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).

Repository

An online database of open access works. Repositories do not undertake peer review but do hold material that has been peer reviewed elsewhere. In addition repositories can hold 'grey literature' such as Theses, Discussion Papers, Datasets and other material.

Rights Retention Strategy

Refers to a strategy designed by cOAlition S to support researchers in their freedom to publish in their journal of choice, whilst remaining compliant with the Plan S requirements of immediate open access without embargo. The strategy is to 'retain rights' in an author's submitted manuscript. This is achieved by adding a rights retention statement in both the submission's cover letter and acknowledgments: 'For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.’ 

Submitted Manuscript

The Submitted Manuscript is the version of the work sent to a journal for peer review. It is sometimes referred to as a 'preprint'.

Symplectic Elements

Symplectic Elements (usually called Elements) is the University's research information management system, and provides a closed environment within which Cambridge researchers can create a profile and share information within the University of Cambridge community. It is administered by the Research Information Office.

UKRI

UK Research and Innovation is a funding body that emcompasses the seven UK Research Councils, Research England (formerly HEFCE) and Innovate UK.

Version of Record

This is the final published version of the article containing the publisher's copy edits and layout. Unless the article is appearing in a fully Open Access journal or we have paid for the work to be Open Access in a hybrid journal, this version is usually not permitted to be placed in an institutional repository or in academic social sharing sites such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu.