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Open Research Toolkit

Created by the Open Research Working Group, comprising representatives of the Australian Research Management Society (ARMS) and the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), the Toolkit supports Australasian institutions to implement or further

Open Research Toolkit

 

 

Author accepted manuscript (AAM) or “Postprint” is ‘the version of the article accepted for publication including all changes made as a result of the peer review process, but excluding any editing, typesetting or other changes made by journal or publisher.

Definition reproduced from What are all the journal article versions? by Open Access Australasia, licensed under CC BY 2.0

ARMS is an acronym for Australasian Research Management Society, with members from universities, research institutions, government, health and research organisations across Australasia.

Definition from ARMS

Developed and maintained by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA), the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance are Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility and Ethics. They are a set of principles that reflect the crucial role of data in advancing Indigenous innovation and self-determination, and promote equitable participation and outcomes from data access, use, reuse and attribution in contemporary data landscapes. This includes the right to create value from Indigenous data in ways that are grounded in Indigenous worldviews and realise opportunities within the knowledge economy.

Definition reproduced from CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.

CAUL is an acronym for Council of Australian University Librarians. CAUL is the peak leadership organisation for university libraries in Australia.

Definition from CAUL

CC BY is a type of Creative Commons License. This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. Plan S funders require this license on research outputs.

Definition reproduced from About CC Licenses by Creative Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Deposit of a copy of a work into a repository where the work is not made open access.

Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law.

The components of CC licenses are:

  • BY – Credit must be given to the creator
  • SA – Adaptations must be shared under the same terms
  • ND – No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted
  • NC - Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted

There are six different license types that combine these components. For example:

  • CC BY: This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use.
  • CC BY-NC-SA: This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms.

Note: not all of the six Creative Commons licences will facilitate full open access. For this reason cOAlition S requires the use of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license by default. As secondary alternatives, they accept the use of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, and use of the public domain dedication, CC0.

Definition reproduced from About CC Licenses by Creative Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Platinum or diamond open access refers to open access journals that are free for readers to access and for authors to publish in. These journals are often community-driven and supported by institutions or by national or regional infrastructure.

Definition reproduced from What are the different types of open access? by Open Access Australasia, licensed under CC BY 2.0

DOI is an acronym for "digital object identifier", meaning a "digital identifier of an object" rather than an "identifier of a digital object". The object can be any entity (thing: physical, digital, or abstract). A DOI provides an actionable, interoperable, persistent link to the object.

DOI definition collated from the International DOI Foundation

Embargo is the restriction of access to the content of a copy of a work for a defined period of time. Embargoes may be imposed by the author, an institution, or more commonly by journal publishers seeking to restrict access to Author Accepted Manuscripts placed in repositories.

Where an embargo is in place, metadata concerning the work is usually available openly including the embargo release date.

FAIR data (according to FORCE11 principles and published in Nature Scientific Data) is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable, in order to facilitate knowledge discovery by assisting humans and machines in their discovery of, access to, integration and analysis of, task-appropriate scientific data and their associated algorithms and workflows.

Definition reproduced from Open Science Training Handbook Glossary by Foster Open Science, licensed under CC0 1.0

The FAIR for Research Software Working Group in the Research Data Alliance is currently working on defining FAIR Research Software principles and associated definition. The project can be found at the Research Data Alliance Website

Gold open access refers to publishing an article open access in a scholarly journal, where the publisher of the journal provides free and immediate online access to the final published version of the article. This may be in a fully open access journal, where access to all articles is free and immediate, or in a hybrid journal, where some articles are available free online for anyone to read, while others are not.

Business models for this form of open access vary. Generally, the publisher charges an Article Processing Charge (APC), which may be paid by the author’s institution or funding body or by an individual researcher. APCs may also be paid as part of transformative agreements. In the case of hybrid journals, APCs are almost always paid.

Articles have a Creative Commons licence applied, which specifies how the article can be used.

See also hybrid open access

Definition based in part on What are the different types of open access? by Open Access Australasia, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Green open access is the term used when the author accepted manuscript (AAM) of a published work is deposited into a subject-based repository or an institutional repository. Generally universities in Australia have a repository for this purpose. International examples include PubMed Central® (PMC). Articles may have a Creative Commons licence applied, which specifies how the article can be used.

Definition reproduced from What are the different types of open access? by Open Access Australasia, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Hybrid open access refers to when an article processing charge is paid for an individual journal article to be made open access in an otherwise subscription journal. This type of open access always has an Article Processing Charge (APC) associated with it.

Definition reproduced from What are the different types of open access? by Open Access Australasia, licensed under CC BY 2.0

'Data about data', specifically descriptive metadata, is structured data about anything that can be named, such as Web pages, books, journal articles, images, songs, products, processes, people (and their activities), research data, concepts, and services.

Metadata is descriptive, administrative and structural. Descriptive metadata is applied to digital objects within repository to facilitate discovery. Administrative metadata relates to the technical components, such as file type and when the digital object was added. Structural metadata indicates relationships of parts of resources to one another.

Definition reproduced from Metadata Basics by DublinCore.org licensed under CC BY 3.0 and What is Metadata by NISO licensed under CC BY 4.0

Open data is research data that is freely available on the internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass to software or use for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

Definition reproduced from Open data by SPARC*, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Open research may refer to a wide range of open research practices, activities and outputs. However, in the context of this toolkit, open research refers to open access publications, data, software and code. 

Open access, as defined by Open Access Australasia, is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers.  Through licensing via an open license (usually a Creative Commons License), freely available outputs can also be legally shared and reused. Hence, open access is more than just free access.

Definition reproduced from What is open access? by Open Access Australasia, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Open source software (OSS) is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance. As they do with proprietary software, users must accept the terms of a license when they use open source software.

Definition adapted from What is Open Source? By OpenSource.com, licensed under CC BY 4.0

Plan S is a set of principles designed by cOAlition S to implement full and immediate open access to research publications. The main principle is “With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in open access journals, on open access platforms, or made immediately available through open access repositories without embargo.”

cOAlition S is an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations who are committed to making full and immediate open access to research publications.

Definition adapted from Coalition S, licensed under CC BY 4.0

A pre-print is the author’s original version of the article before peer review or editing, as submitted by an author to the journal - that is, the 'submitted manuscript'. It may also the version submitted to a preprint server.

Definition adapted from What are all the journal article versions? by Open Access Australasia, licensed under CC BY 2.0

A repository is an online archive for the storage of digital objects such as research articles, book chapters, reports, theses, datasets, code.

Repositories may be:

  • Institutional such as the research output repositories found in many Australian universities
  • Subject Based e.g. PubMed Central® (PMC) biomedical and life sciences repository
  • Format based e.g. Australian Data Archive research data repository and ArXiv preprint repository
  • National e.g. NARCIS repository for research from Dutch research institutions

Repositories can be:

  • 100% open access with all content & associated metadata freely available
  • Closed or dark with object access restricted to specific users
  • A combination of open and closed with some outputs restricted indefinitely or under a timed embargo period

Repositories form the basis of green open access.

Descriptive metadata is generally applied to digital objects within repository to facilitate discovery

Research software is software that is used to generate, process or analyse results that are intended to appear in a publication (either in a journal, conference paper, monograph, book or thesis). Research software can be anything from a few lines of code written by someone within the research team, to a professionally developed software package. Software that does not generate, process or analyse results - such as word processing software, or the use of a web search - does not commonly count as ‘research software’.

Definition adapted from Hettrick. S. J., et al. (2014). UK Research Software Survey 2014 [Data set]. doi:10.5281/zenodo.14809, licensed under CC BY 4.0

Rights retention refers to an author retaining their rights to their own work in addition to any copyright agreement. Authors are able to use and re-use their work as they choose. This may include actions such as freely distributing copies of the work via any research network they choose, freedom to use their work within any other work of their own or anyone else’s, freedom to use the work for teaching as they choose, freedom to share the work as they choose, and so on.

Definition adapted from Coalition S, licensed under CC BY 4.0

Self-deposit is the act of an author depositing a copy of their manuscript in a digital repository. In the early days of open access, this was referred to as 'self-archiving'.

Version of record or final published version is the peer reviewed, edited, formatted and typeset version of the article, including any tagging, indexing and other enhancements from a publisher. It includes any post publication corrections made by a publisher.

Definition reproduced from What are all the journal article versions? by Open Access Australasia, licensed under CC BY 2.0


Except where otherwise noted, all content on the Open Research Toolkit is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence. Under the licence conditions, please attribute Open Research Toolkit.