There’s a lot of jargon that appears when we start talking about open access. Sometimes it seems like you’re learning another language! We’ve collected the abbreviations and terminology and put them on this page. Now you can easily check the jargon buster when you come acrosss something you haven’t seen before or simply need a reminder.

APC – Article Processing Charge. Some publishers charge authors an APC before they will publish their article.

Closed Deposit – publishers and/or funders state a complete work deposited in an institutional repository must not accessible throughout a specified period of time. After the time period has expired, the work can become open access.

Date of publication – earliest date that the final version of record is made available on the publisher’s website

DELNI – Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland

Embargo – a period of time during which access to a published work is restricted to people either paying a fee or using an authorised login to access a publisher’s website where they can access the full published text of the work.

Green and Gold – these colours represent the different methods of open access publishing

HEFCE – Higher Education Funding Council for England (now defunct and replaced by Research England)

HEFCW – Higher Education Funding Council for Wales

HEI – Higher Education Institution

Hybrid journal – a subscription journal that also contains individual open access articles published after payment of an APC

ISSN – International Standard Serial Number

ORCID – Open Researcher and Contributor ID. Register with ORCID and get a unique identifying number that distinguishes you (and your work) from other researchers with a similar or identical name

Post-print – author’s manuscript, after amendment from peer review. Also known as ‘accepted author manuscript/final author version/author’s final peer-reviewed manuscript’

Pre-print – the author’s manuscript before amendments from peer review

Predatory journal – a journal or publisher that aggressively targets academics and researchers

Publisher’s PDF – version that appears on publisher’s website after publication, including publisher copy-editing, proof corrections, layout and typesetting. Also known as ‘final version of record’.

REF – Research Excellence Framework

SFC – Scottish Funding Council

Target journal – the journal you’d like or choose to have your research to be published in