Open accessOpen access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. Under some models of open access publishing, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright. The main focus of the open access movement is "peer reviewed research literature". Historically, this has centered mainly on print-based academic journals.
Academic publishingAcademic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication.
Predatory publishingPredatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors only superficially checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and without providing editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not. Namely, the rejection rate of predatory journals is low, but seldom is zero.
Creative Commons licenseA Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
Creative CommonsCreative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.
Open scienceOpen science is the movement to make scientific research (including publications, data, physical samples, and software) and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional. Open science is transparent and accessible knowledge that is shared and developed through collaborative networks. It encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open-notebook science (such as openly sharing data and code), broader dissemination and engagement in science and generally making it easier to publish, access and communicate scientific knowledge.
Free-culture movementThe free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media. The movement objects to what it considers over-restrictive copyright laws. Many members of the movement argue that such laws hinder creativity. They call this system "permission culture".
Open dataOpen data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements such as open-source software, open-source hardware, open content, open specifications, open education, open educational resources, open government, open knowledge, open access, open science, and the open web. The growth of the open data movement is paralleled by a rise in intellectual property rights.
Open researchOpen research is research that is openly accessible by others. Those who publish research in this way are often concerned with making research more transparent, more collaborative, more wide-reaching, and more efficient. Open research aims to make both research methods and the resulting data freely available, often via the internet, in order to support reproducibility and, potentially, massively distributed research collaboration. In this regard, it is related to both open source software and citizen science.
Publish or perish"Publish or perish" is an aphorism describing the pressure to publish academic work in order to succeed in an academic career. Such institutional pressure is generally strongest at research universities. Some researchers have identified the publish or perish environment as a contributing factor to the replication crisis. Successful publications bring attention to scholars and their sponsoring institutions, which can help continued funding and their careers.
Open scientific dataOpen scientific data or open research data is a type of open data focused on publishing observations and results of scientific activities available for anyone to analyze and reuse. A major purpose of the drive for open data is to allow the verification of scientific claims, by allowing others to look at the reproducibility of results, and to allow data from many sources to be integrated to give new knowledge. The modern concept of scientific data emerged in the second half of the 20th century, with the development of large knowledge infrastructure to compute scientific information and observation.
Open sourceOpen source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public.
Scholarly peer reviewScholarly peer review or academic peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of having a draft version of a researcher's methods and findings reviewed (usually anonymously) by experts (or "peers") in the same field. Peer review is widely used for helping the academic publisher (that is, the editor-in-chief, the editorial board or the program committee) decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected for official publication in an academic journal, a monograph or in the proceedings of an academic conference.
Review articleA review article is an article that summarizes the current state of understanding on a topic within a certain discipline. A review article is generally considered a secondary source since it may analyze and discuss the method and conclusions in previously published studies. It resembles a survey article or, in news publishing, overview article, which also surveys and summarizes previously published primary and secondary sources, instead of reporting new facts and results.
Free softwareFree software or libre software or libreware is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software (including profiting from them) regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program.
Definition of Free Cultural WorksThe Definition of Free Cultural Works evaluates and recommends compatible free content licenses. The Open Content Project by David A. Wiley in 1998 was a predecessor project which defined open content. In 2003, Wiley joined the Creative Commons as "Director of Educational Licenses" and announced the Creative Commons and their licenses as successors to his Open Content Project. Therefore, Creative Commons' Erik Möller in collaboration with Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Benjamin Mako Hill, Angela Beesley, and others started in 2006 the Free Cultural Works project for defining free content.
Institutional repositoryAn institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published works to increase their visibility and collaboration with other academics However, most of these outputs produced by universities are not effectively accessed and shared by researchers and other stakeholders As a result Academics should be involved in the implementation and development of an IR project so that they can learn the benefits and purpose of building an IR.
Open textbookAn open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. Many open textbooks are distributed in either print, e-book, or audio formats that may be downloaded or purchased at little or no cost. Part of the broader open educational resources movement, open textbooks increasingly are seen as a solution to challenges with traditionally published textbooks, such as access and affordability concerns.
Impact factorThe impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as indexed by Clarivate's Web of Science. As a journal-level metric, it is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher impact factor values are given the status of being more important, or carry more prestige in their respective fields, than those with lower values.
MetascienceMetascience (also known as meta-research) is the use of scientific methodology to study science itself. Metascience seeks to increase the quality of scientific research while reducing inefficiency. It is also known as "research on research" and "the science of science", as it uses research methods to study how research is done and find where improvements can be made. Metascience concerns itself with all fields of research and has been described as "a bird's eye view of science".
