Learning the Lingo

One way to navigate the academic publishing industry is learning the vocabulary. Below are some definitions of terms that will get you going in no time.

OA = Open Access. This means that an article is free for the public to read as soon as it's published. In my experience, some of the articles I work on have worked on have been open access. Most of the time, authors pay a fee to the journal to make their articles open access and to keep copyright - and it's not cheap.

Gold Open Access = Open access arrangement with fees charged to the authors. In exchange, the article is made available for free on the journal website and the author keeps the copyright to the work (typically, it transfers to the publishing company, so they own everything). See "APC" for more info. Anecdotally, this is the most common kind of open access arrangement offered by publishers. 

APC = article processing charge or article publication charge. Also known as open access fees, this is the amount of money that authors pay to publishers to make their work immediately available to the public and to keep the copyright. It can range from $2,000 to over $10,000. Article processing/publication charge is a misnomer, as it's more of an extortion fee. To find the fee for a given journal, search for the journal's name and "APC".

Embargo = The amount of time that must pass before an article is available to the public for free (unless they adopted an open access arrangement). In other words, a blackout period. This used to be 12 months but has been cut down to 0 by the National Institutes of Health for new articles accepted for publication, provided that the research was at least partially funded by the NIH (see the new NIH public access policy).

Green Open Access = Open access arrangement without fees charged to the authors. The author uploads the paper to an online repository such as a preprint server or PubMed Central (see below for definitions) without paying a fee to the publisher. In exchange, the public can read the article for free right away. One caveat is the author typically does not get to keep the copyright, so the publisher owns everything - see the Carnegie Mellon Library's website for more info. For a list of journals offering Green Open Access, see the Penn State Library website.

Peer review = The process by which articles are vetted for accuracy by researchers and professionals outside the author's team.

Preprint = A preprint is the copy of an article that authors put online for the public to view for free before it is published in a journal. If you are an author, check the terms and conditions of your publishing agreement to see if you can post preprints, or negotiate with the publishing company. (Disclosure: I have not uploaded preprints, but I wish I had.) One other caveat with preprints: Some of these have been peer-reviewed, but some haven't. Reasons can vary - sometimes authors have had articles vetted by their teams and are waiting to hear back from external peer reviewers, so they decide to put the article up in the meantime so people can read it. Other times there is negligence at play, so use your best judgment when reading articles without peer-review and err on the side of caution. If results are too good to be true, they probably are.

Preprint server = Websites where authors can upload preprints and readers can read them. Authors don't have to pay to put their articles on preprint servers, and readers don't have to pay to view them.  Examples are arXiv (plus related websites like biorXiv and medrXiv), Preprints.org and DeSci Publish (preprints plus data, computer programming code, and anything else authors want to add. Check with your organization before uploading data and code to make sure you're in compliance with privacy laws and policies). 

PMC = PubMed Central, a website with free articles and abstracts (article blurbs) maintained by the National Institutes of Health. This comes up a lot in the NIH Public Access Policy. Everyone who does NIH-funded research has to upload the resulting peer-reviewed articles to PubMed Central, which is a lot of people, and means there are thousands of articles.  (Disclaimer: my team's articles are on PubMed Central.)