scholarly communication

In today’s changing landscape of scholarly communication, new terms and organizations are constantly emerging. This brief glossary offers quick definitions for commonly encountered terms and includes links to fuller definitions where warranted.

Term	Definition
Archiving	Preservation of the scholarly record over time
ARL	American Research Libraries. ARL is a nonprofit membership organization of 126 resesarch libraries in North America. http://www.arl.org/
Author Rights	Allows authors to retain specified rights to their published articles and to negotiate copyright transfer agreements with publishers. http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.html
Author's Version	The publicly available version of a work maintained by the author after acceptance by the publisher, but excluding the proof and the definitive version, which has been formally processed and published. Also refers to the personal copy personal version, or personal work.
Copyright & Intellectual Property	Work together to provide access to information while safeguarding the author’s rights to their intellectual property.
Creative Commons	An organization that provides free tools to authors, scientists, artists, and educators to earmark their works with the desired copyright licenses by offering "a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors and artists.” http://creativecommons.org
Definitive Version	The final version of a published work. Typically, the definitive version has been accepted, edited and published in print and/or digital form. Also refers to the final version or publisher’s version.
Digital Preservation	Digital preservation encompasses a broad range of activities designed to extend the usable life of machine-readable computer files and protect them from media failure, physical loss, and obsolescence. http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/dpm/dpm-eng/terminology/preservation.html
Digital Repository	An online, searchable, web-accessible database containing works of research deposited by or on behalf of scholars with the purposes of increasing access to scholarship and long-term preservation. Digital repositories many be institution or discipline specific.
Grey Literature	Scholarly works that have not been formally reviewed and have not appeared in standard, recognized publications.
Institutional Repository	A publicly available, searchable, web-accessible database containing the digital scholarly communication of an institution deposited by or on the behalf of the authors with the purposes of increasing access to scholarship and /or long term preservation.
IR Software	Complete systems (commercial or open source) that facilitate submitting, describing, storing, and permitting access to digital scholarly communication.
Keywords	Descriptive terms or phrases relating to an item/body of work.
Metadata	Structured information describing an item, e.g. its publication date, author, keywords, document type, title, and summary. Metadata can support searching and retrieval and other functions of a repository.
OAI	The Open Access Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards such as web interfaces that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. http://www.openarchives.org/
Open Access	The scholarly communication reform movement that aims to make scholarly literature freely available on the web and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Peer Review	The review of an academic document or other scholarly communication by experts in the same field before publication.
Post-Print	A scholarly article in its final form after it has gone through the peer review/refereeing process with revisions having been made at such time that it has been accepted but prior to final press run or publication.
Pre-Print	A scholarly article that has not yet passed the peer review/refereeing process. This may include items in pre-publication status that may have been reviewed and accepted; submitted but without a publication decision; or intended for publication and being circulated for comment.
RoMEO	Rights MEtadata for Open archiving investigates the rights issues surrounding the self-archiving of research and reports the archiving policies of publishers on the RoMEO site. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php
Scholarly Communication	Process through which research, writing, or other scholarly output is created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use.
Self-Archiving	The act of uploading scholarly works to an online repository for the intent of long-term preservation.
SHERPA	Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access is an organization investigating issues concerning the future of scholarly communication. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/
SPARC	Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition is an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations that is broadly interested in helping to create systems that expand information dissemination and use in a networked digital environment while responding to the needs of academe. http://www.arl.org/sparc
Subject Repository	A repository dedicated to archiving and making available works in a specific field of study.
Versions	Various stages in the creation of an item. This concept is used in author contracts with publishers to define which version(s) can be submitted to an institutional repository. Common terms: Author’s version Pre-print Post-print Definitive version (final or publisher’s version)