Glossary

All rights reserved is a phrase that originated in copyright law as part of copyright notices. It indicates that the copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works; that is, they have not waived any such right. (Wikipedia)

An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. (Wikipedia)

Additional language and agreements added to a publishing agreement by an author.

“Big Deal” refers to any large journal aggregation, including both “all-in” packages (essentially all titles within a publisher’s portfolio) and large subject collections. (Scholarly Kitchen)

Big Deals are multi-year journal contracts sold by major vendors that provide access to all or nearly all of a vendor's journal content for a bundled price that grows at a preset annual rate for the life of the contract.

Bronze open access articles are free to read only on the publisher page, but lack a clearly identifiable license. Such articles are typically not available for reuse. (Wikipedia)

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is a public statement of principles relating to open access to the research literature, which was released to the public on February 14, 2002.

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is a public statement of principles relating to open access to the research literature, which was released to the public on February 14, 2002. It arose from a convening in Budapest organized by the Open Society Institute on December 1–2, 2001 to promote open access, which at that time was also known as Free Online Scholarship. This small gathering of individuals is recognized as one of the major defining events of the open access movement. (Wikipedia)

Citation counts measure the number of times an articles has been cited by other research.

Citizen science projects actively involve citizens in scientific endeavour that generates new knowledge or understanding. Citizens may act as contributors, collaborators, or as project leader and have a meaningful role in the project. (Wikipedia)

On 4 September 2018, a group of national research funding organisations, with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC), announced the launch of cOAlition S, an initiative to make full and immediate Open Access to research publications a reality. (cOAlition S)

Colonization (British English: colonisation) is a process of establishing control over areas or peoples for foreign people to advance their trade, cultivation, exploitation and possibly settlement. A colonizer is the individual engaging in colonization and continued occupation of the land. (Wikipedia)

Operating-system-level virtualization or application-level virtualization over multiple network resources so that software applications can run in isolated user spaces called containers in any cloud or non-cloud environment, regardless of type or vendor. (Wikipedia)

A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. (Wikipedia)

Creative 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. (Wikipedia)

The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) goes back to the 2012 annual meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology in San Francisco.  DORA supports the development and promotion of best practices in the assessment of scholarly research. It calls for the elimination of journal-based metrics, evaluating research on its own merits, leveraging the use of online publications, and aligning assessment with core academic values.

A derivative work is a work based on or derived from one or more already existing works. Common derivative works include translations, musical arrangements, motion picture versions of literary material or plays, art reproductions, abridgments, and condensations of preexisting works. (Wikipedia)

Journals that publish open access without charging authors article processing charges are sometimes referred to as diamond or platinum OA. Since they do not charge either readers or authors directly, such publishers often require funding from external sources such as the sale of advertisements, academic institutions, learned societies, philanthropists or government grants. (Wikipedia)

A digital object identifier (DOI) is a unique identifier associated with an electronic object and contains metadata elements that make the object significantly easier to find and track how it has been used. DOIs are assigned to any entity for use on the Web. Digital objects may include: images, data and data sets, books, book chapters, research reports, and dissertations.

A disciplinary repository (or subject repository) is an online archive, often an open-access repository, containing works or data associated with these works of scholars in a particular subject area. (Wikipedia)

Elsevier is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as The Lancet, Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, Trends, the Current Opinion series, the online citation database Scopus, the SciVal tool for measuring research performance, the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service. (Elsevier, Wikipedia, CC BY SA 4.0)

An agreed upon delays for the public release of research.

A license in which ownership in one or more of the copyright owner's rights is transferred by the copyright owner to a third party.

In 2016, the ‘FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship’ were published in Scientific Data. The authors intended to provide guidelines to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets. The principles emphasise machine-actionability (i.e., the capacity of computational systems to find, access, interoperate, and reuse data with none or minimal human intervention) because humans increasingly rely on computational support to deal with data as a result of the increase in volume, complexity, and creation speed of data. (GoFAIR)

Free Software (with a capital F) refers to a specific philosophical approach to software that emphasizes the user’s freedom to run, study, modify, and share both the original and modified program.

Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that gives users the right to use, share, modify, and distribute the software – modified or not – to everyone and provides the means to exercise those rights using the software's source code. (Wikipedia)

Generalist data repositories accept data regardless of data type, format, content, or disciplinary focus. (NIH)

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that is able to create new content, such as text, images, music, or entire datasets, based on patterns and information it has learned from existing data. While traditional AI systems are mainly used to analyze existing data and make predictions, generative AI takes this one step further by creating new data similar to the data it accesses. When an AI technology is creating something by itself, this is called “generative AI” or “GenAI” (Generative AI, UBC).

Global North and Global South are terms denoting a method of grouping countries based on their defining characteristics with regard to socioeconomics. The Global North, which the UNCTAD describes as broadly comprising Northern America and Europe, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. (Wikipedia)

Global North and Global South are terms denoting a method of grouping countries based on their defining characteristics with regard to socioeconomics. the Global South broadly comprises Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia (excluding Israel, Japan, South Korea), and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand). (Wikipedia)

Gold open access refers to making research freely available immediately upon publication in an open access journal.  Unfortunately, many authors are deterred from gold open access publishing because prestigious open access journals often charge article processing charges (APCs).

A legal provision typically found within contracts, in which one party (the grantor) provides another party (the grantee) specific rights or permissions over certain intellectual property or resources.

A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation. (Wikipedia)

Self-archiving by authors is permitted under green OA. Independently from publication by a publisher, the author also posts the work to a website controlled by the author, the research institution that funded or hosted the work, or to an independent central open repository, where people can download the work without paying. Green OA is free of charge for the author. (Wikipedia)

The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. (Wikipedia)

A human-readable medium or human-readable format is any encoding of data or information that can be naturally read by humans. (Wikipedia)

A journal that publishes both gold open access and traditional subscription-based research.

An institutional repository is a digital archive which centralizes, preserves, and provides access to an institution's intellectual output. (CARL)

Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce. (WIPO)

Ithaka S+R  helps academic and cultural communities serve the public good and navigate economic, technological, and demographic change. The organization generates action-oriented research for institutional decision-making and act as a hub to promote and guide collaboration.  (About, Ithaka S+R)

The Journal Impact Factor only applies to journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and/or Social Sciences Citation Index by Clarivate Analytics. The Journal Impact Factor is a measure reflecting the annual average (mean) number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. An essay written by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) states “The JCR provides quantitative tools for ranking, evaluating, categorizing, and comparing journals. The impact factor is one of these; it is a measure of the frequency with which the “average article” in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period. The annual JCR impact factor is a ratio between citations and recent citable items published.”  (Journal Impact Factor - The Metrics Toolkit by The Metrics Toolkit Editorial Board, licensed under a CC BY 4.0)

A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation. (Wikipedia)

Literate programming is writing out the program logic in a human language with included (separated by a primitive markup) code snippets and macros. (Wikipedia)

A medium capable of storing data in a format easily readable by a digital computer or a sensor. It contrasts with human-readable medium and data. (Wikipedia)

Metadata means "data about data". Metadata is defined as the data providing information about one or more aspects of the data; it is used to summarize basic information about data that can make tracking and working with specific data easier. (Wikipedia)

Open Access refers to an alternative academic publishing model in which research outputs (including peer-reviewed academic journal articles, theses, book chapters, and monographs) are made freely available to the general public for viewing, and often for reuse. This is unlike the traditional scholarly publishing model under which publishers require institutions or individuals to pay for access to these materials.

Licenses that grant permission for others to freely access, reuse, redistribute, or build upon your scholarly work.

Open data is data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike.

Teaching and learning materials that are made available to others to use without cost, and with an open license that allows them to reuse, revise and redistribute them.

A non-proprietary so that the file can be opened using open software that is not owned by a specific company

Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. (Wikipedia)

When each of step of the workflow is openly shared – making all stages of the research project transparent and reproducible.

Plan S is an initiative for Open Access publishing that was launched in September 2018 with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council (ERC) . The plan is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations. Plan S requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. (cOAlition S)

Journals that publish open access without charging authors article processing charges are sometimes referred to as diamond or platinum OA. Since they do not charge either readers or authors directly, such publishers often require funding from external sources such as the sale of advertisements, academic institutions, learned societies, philanthropists or government grants. (Wikipedia)

Predatory publishing exploits the Open Access publishing model. Most Open Access journals - including high-quality journals - charge the author a fee ("Article Processing Charge" or APC) to support publication and peer-review costs. Predatory journals exist only to collect article processing  charges from authors. There is no legitimate peer review: every article submitted with payment, is published (Avoid Predatory Publishers, UBC Library).

A preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. (Wikipedia)

An aphorism describing the institutional pressure to publish academic works in order to succeed in an academic career.

A legal contract between a publisher and a writer or author (or more than one), to publish original content by the writer(s) or author(s). (Wikipedia)

R is a programming language for statistical computing and data visualization. It has been widely adopted in the fields of data mining, bioinformatics, data analysis, and data science. (Wikipedia)

Uncompressed and unedited data files.

A README file contains descriptive information about the content of a directory in which the file is located. The scope of the information generally includes the files of the directory and may include descendant directories; even the directory tree. (Wikipedia)

When the same workflow (e.g., research question, experimental design or approach, context or population, and analysis plan) is used using a new data set the outcome is consistent (albeit with a small margin of error).

The workflow and data used in the research project can be used to yield the same results.

The circumstance in which research is published by a researcher or researchers before a rival team can publish theirs on the same topic, or where an idea or results are published without proper attribution to those who came up with the idea or had results first. (School of Medicine at Mount Sinai)

The series of steps and decisions made to do the research, and documenting a research workflow allows the process to be repeated or understood by others.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an international alliance of academic and research libraries developed by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998 which promotes open access to scholarship. (Wikipedia)

The problem of rising subscription costs of serial publications, especially scholarly journals, outpacing academic institutions' library budgets and limiting their ability to meet researchers' needs. The prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much faster than inflation for several decades, while the funds available to the libraries have remained static or have declined in real terms. As a result, academic and research libraries have regularly canceled serial subscriptions to accommodate price increases of the remaining subscriptions. (Wikipedia)

A business model where software applications are hosted and made available to users over the internet.

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. It encompasses a wide range of disciplines that have the potential to help solve real-world problems and make a global impact. (Study STEM in Canada)

Text and Data Mining is a broad label that refers to bulk collection and analysis of a corpus of data. A corpus can be anything from the full text of a set of journal articles to public social media posts to census data. The work of Text and Data Mining is to programmtically extract unseen relationships in the data (TDM, UBC Library).

Traditional knowledge (TK) is knowledge, know-how, skills and practices that are developed, sustained and passed on from generation to generation within a community, often forming part of its cultural or spiritual identity. (WIPO)

The TK Labels are a tool for Indigenous communities to add existing local protocols for access and use to recorded cultural heritage that is digitally circulating outside community contexts. The TK Labels help non-community users of this cultural heritage understand its importance and significance to the communities from where it derives and continues to have meaning (TK Labels by Local Contexts licensed under CC NC-ND 4.0).

Traditional Knowledge (TK) Licenses are developed in conversation with Indigenous communities to provide a set of licenses, similar to the Creative Commons license structure, that identifies the needs of Indigenous peoples when addressing intellectual property.

Transformative agreements are those contracts negotiated between institutions (libraries, national and regional consortia) and publishers that transform the business model underlying scholarly journal publishing, moving from one based on toll access (subscription) to one in which publishers are remunerated a fair price for their open access publishing services. (ESAC)

The three federal research funding agencies—the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Data that is accessible to anyone, whereas encrypted data is secure and locked and would require a pass code or key to unlock the data

UNESCO is the United Nations organization that promotes cooperation in education, science, culture and communication to foster peace worldwide. The Organization provides key services for its Member States, setting global norms and standards, developing tools for international cooperation, producing knowledge for public policies and building global networks of sites and institutions inscribed on its lists. (UNESCO)

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations with the aim of promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture.

Version control is a system of recording changes made to a file or set of files over time that can later be reviewed

A code quality measurement used in software development measuring the number of times you say “What the 'heck'?”per minute when you're trying to understand someone else's code.

Software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web page, or slide presentation. WYSIWYG implies a user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the result while the document is being created. In general, WYSIWYG implies the ability to directly manipulate the layout of a document without having to type or remember names of layout commands. (Wikipedia)