Open Access is a form of scholarly publishing and the process of making academic research outputs available online for free with limited reuse barriers. It has many benefits such as increasing the reach and impact of scholarly output whilst allowing the retention of copyright which is becoming increasingly important. By its very nature, Open Access is concerned with equitable access and an increase in dissemination of scholarly literature means that a world wide audience can engage with the outputs from research. Fundamentally, information should be seen as a public good and Open Access seeks to ensure that this is achieved.
| Article Processing Charge (APC) | the fee that is paid to the publisher by the author, their employer or their funder to allow immediate (gold) Open Access |
| Creative Commons Licence | a system of licensing that allows copyright owners to specify different levels of rights protection for their work |
| Double dipping | an institution pays twice for a Open Access journal article; firstly through the institutional subscription and secondly the APC if an author wishes to make their particular article open access |
| Embargo period | the length of time before a publisher will permit the posting of the postprint of an article into an Open Access repository. See Sherpa/Romeo for more details of embargo dates for individual journals |
| Institutional repository | an Open Access archive, organised and maintained by a higher education institution, giving access to the research outputs of staff within that institution. UDORA is the institutional repository at Derby. |
| Post Print | or accepted manuscript. The version of the paper which has been through peer review and has been accepted for publication. See Sherpa/Romeo for details of which version of the article you are able to upload for a particular journal/publisher |
| Preprint | or author original/author version. The version of the paper as submitted to a journal for peer review. See Sherpa/Romeo for details of which version of the article you are able to upload for a particular journal/publisher |