Research Publication, Open Access and Rights Retention Policy

Article Processing Charges (APC)

An article processing charge (APC) is a fee paid to the publisher to make an article freely available online. This fee can range from a few hundred to several thousand pounds depending on the journal. The APC is payable when your manuscript is editorially accepted and before publication, it is charged to either you, your funder, or the University.  

The version of the article that has been accepted for publication by the Journal after peer review and any corrections/revisions.

Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CrediT)

CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a high-level taxonomy, including 14 roles, that can be used to represent the roles typically played by contributors to research outputs. The roles describe each contributor’s specific contribution to the scholarly output.

Creative Commons Licences were released in 2002 by Creative Commons (CC) an American non-profit corporation founded in 2001. It provides free licences for creators to use when making their work available to the public.  Copyright owners are able to specify different levels of rights protection and terms of reuse for their work. There have been five different versions, the version 4.0 is the most current and was released in 2013. There are some differences between v4.0 and the earlier versions such as v3.0, such as:

• Version 4.0 corrects a previous oversight in the older versions and gives the licensee 30 days upon discovering a breach to correct any licence violations caused by failing to comply with the terms and conditions, for example by not including the required attribution.

• In version 4.0 titles are not required for proper attribution. This was a requirement in earlier versions. Users are encouraged to use titles if supplied but this change recognises that not all works have titles.

• Version 3.0 and earlier licences offered 'ported' versions of their international CC licences for many jurisdictions, these included adaptations to reflect local language, legal processes and protocols. Version 4.0 is an international licence and is jurisdiction-neutral to enable its use to be internationally valid. Particularly useful with global research projects and organisations. 

• With version 4.0, licensees are required to indicate if they have made any modifications to the licensed material. For example you must state if you have used an excerpt of any work. This applies regardless of whether those adaptations created any modified material. In version 3.0, the obligation to indicate any modifications only applied if it resulted in the creation of an adaptation.

For more information on the changes between the licence versions please see https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License%20Versions

Creative Commons Attribution License    (CC-BY)

The CC-BY licence allows others to distribute, remix, modify and develop, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. See wiki.creativecommons.org for recommended practices of attribution. This is the most accommodating of licences and allows maximum dissemination and use of the licensed materials.  It is the only type of licence major funders (eg UKRI and the Wellcome Foundation) accept as being compliant with their Open Access requirements.

Digital Object Identifier (DoI)

A Digital Object Identifier (DoI) is a unique string of numbers, letters and symbols which uniquely identify an article or document and provide it with a permanent web address (URL).

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI), is a technology which allows machines to generate new content, including text, images, video, audio, or code. Large Language Models (LLMs) are part of this category of Gen AI and produce text outputs.  The University has a Guide on the Acceptable and Responsible Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Research, a link to which can be found below this Glossary Table.

Gold Open Access

Gold Open Access refers to a published work which is free to access via the publisher’s website immediately upon publication. It will often have clear re-use rights (perhaps detailed through a Creative Commons licence) which go beyond what is permitted by copyright legislation. A publisher may charge a fee for this through applying an Article Processing Charge (APC) or Book Processing Charge (BPC) to the individual work. There are journals which do not charge authors (or their institutions) to publish open access. These may be subsidised by a third party or paid for by library partnerships (e.g. Open Library of Humanities). This is sometimes referred to as ‘diamond’ or ‘platinum’ Open Access.

Green open access (also referred to as “self-archiving”) is when an author publishes in a subscription-based journal and a copy of the research output (usually the AAM) is deposited in an institutional repository (UDORA). Following any potential embargo period (set by the publisher) the manuscript is then made free to access. The published final version of the journal remains behind a subscription paywall on the journal website, but a version of the paper (AAM or VoR if permitted) is available to anyone from the institutional repository (UDORA).

Open Access

Open Access is defined (based on the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation - UNESCO definition) as access to information, allowing it to be downloaded, distributed, printed, and searched without financial, legal, technical, or barriers for lawful reuse.  

Open Researcher and Contribution ID (ORCiD)

Open Researcher and Contribution ID (ORCiD) is a free, unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship and innovation activities. By linking your publications and research outputs to your ORCiD it helps them become more discoverable and avoids them getting confused with someone with a similar name.

Plan S

Plan S is an initiative for Open Access publishing. The Plan is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funding and performing institutions. Plan S requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants are published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. 

Predatory Publishers

There is no standard definition of what constitutes a predatory publisher, but generally they are viewed as publishers who often use aggressive advertising and an apparent professional appearance to lure scholarly authors into publishing contributions against payment of a publication fee, but do not provide any, or inadequate quality assurance measures.  The University has a guide about predatory publishing and how to avoid it, a link to which can be found below this Glossary Table.

A complete version of the manuscript that has been openly shared, but not yet undergone peer review and/or been published in an academic journal. Use of preprints is an established practice in some disciplines, for example physics, maths and astronomy and is becoming more common in other subject areas, such as biomedical sciences and social sciences.  

Post-Print

A post-print is the version of a manuscript which has undergone peer-review and has been accepted for publication.  There are two types of post-prints:

• a post-print may be a completely identical to the final published version, also known as the publisher’s version, or the version of record.
• The post-print may be substantively the same as the publishers version, but differ, for example in terms of formatting.  This is known as the author accepted manuscript (AAM).

UDORA

(University of Derby Online Research Archive)

UDORA (University of Derby Online Research Archive) is the University of Derby’s open research institutional repository that digitally hold research outputs and provides free, immediate and permanent access to research publications for anyone to use, download and distribute.

Version of Record (VoR)

The final version of the article that has been published, having undergone typesetting and will have the publisher's logo on it.