A glossary of open science and research

This glossary provides definitions of established concepts in the field of open science and research.
Alt­met­rics

Altmetrics provide an assessment, based on various indicators, of the societal impact of research and research publications. The indicators used may include, for example, the number of times a publication has been shared on social media.

Altmetrics can be used to survey topical themes in science and research and determine which topics are of greatest interest to researchers and the general public.

AOE.fi

AOE.fi is a library of open educational resources, where you can find and share open access learning material for all levels of education.

The service is developed by the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Finnish National Agency for Education, under the coordination of CSC – IT Center for Science.

APC

An APC (article processing charge) is a fee that the author or the author’s organisation pays to the publisher for making an article accessible in a subscription-based print journal or for publishing the article in a digital, open access journal.

APCs may range from €300 to €4,500. Helsinki University Library has negotiated discounts on APCs with a number of publishers.

Art­icle ver­sions

When a published article is self-archived in the repository of a university or other institution, it may be in the form of a preprint, postprint or a publisher’s version, depending on the publisher’s specifications.

A preprint is the version of the article before it has been submitted for a peer review, a postprint (also known as the author’s accepted version, or AAM, or the final draft) is the author’s last version after the peer review (excluding the publisher’s layout process or page numbering), and the publisher’s version is the final version, complete with layout and page numbers.

Bib­li­o­met­rics

Bibliometrics analyses scholarly publications based on quantitative indicators, such as the number of citations.

BPC

A BPC (book processing charge) is a processing charge for making a book openly accessible. The fee may range from €4,000 to €20,000 per book.

At the University of Helsinki, open access books are published by Helsinki University Press (HUP). The BPC of these peer-reviewed works is paid by the University of Helsinki.

Helda Open Books (HOB) is a collection that includes open access works by University of Helsinki researchers. Helsinki University Library is in charge of their publication.

Cit­izen science

Citizen science is research conducted in whole or in part by non-professionals, who contribute, for example, by classifying or collecting data.

The Helsinki Term Bank for the Arts and Sciences is an example of citizen science.

DOI

DOI (Digital object identifier) is a persistent identifier (that may contain both numbers and letters) that serves as a permanent link to a publication.

A persistent identifier assigned to an article or dataset remains the same even if the location and address of the publication or dataset changes.

Embargo

An embargo is the period of time, determined by the publisher and starting from the date of publication, during which authors must refrain from self-archiving their publication in a repository. The duration of embargoes varies widely (6–24 months) depending on the journal.

When self-archiving an article in Helda, the embargo can be specified in the TUHAT research database, and the publication will then automatically transfer to the Helda repository after the end of the embargo.

Editori

Editori is a service for editing and publishing open access journals, offered to researchers and students of the University of Helsinki. The service runs on the Open Journal Systems (OJS) publication platform, an open source solution.

Helsinki University Library provides technical support for the platform and assigns persistent DOIs for peer-reviewed articles, while users are in charge of the content of journals and commit to using the CC BY licence for their publications. The journals are openly accessible in the Editori portal at journals.helsinki.fi.

Gold open ac­cess

Gold (golden) open access is a form of open access publishing, in which the publication becomes immediately available in the publisher’s or other provider’s online service. Gold open access is often financed with article processing charges.

Green open ac­cess

Green open access means placing a publication or a copy of it in a repository for the discipline or organisation, where it is accessible immediately or after a pre-defined embargo.

Green open access is free of charge to the author and does not involve author processing charges.

Helda

Helda is the open repository of the University of Helsinki. It is maintained by Helsinki University Library.

Helda Open Books

Helda Open Books is a University of Helsinki collection of open access monographs and a free publication service for the University’s researchers and teachers.

Helda Open Books contains a diverse range of works related to research and teaching in different disciplines (including textbooks, classics in various disciplines and anthologies).

Hel­sin­ki Uni­ver­si­ty Press

Helsinki University Press (HUP) is an international scholarly publisher, jointly run by Helsinki University Library and Gaudeamus, an academic publisher.

Helsinki University Press publishes open access monographs and journals.

Hy­brid open ac­cess

Hybrid open access is a publishing model that includes elements of both subscription-based and open-access journals.

An APC paid by the author makes the author’s article openly accessible, while the rest of the journal’s content remains behind a paywall. Hybrid open access is considered to be an interim stage on the path towards fully open access publishing.

The Plan S scheme does not permit hybrid open access publishing.

Li­cence

A licence is a permit, granted by the author, to distribute and adapt an openly accessible work under specific conditions.

Creative Commons (CC) is the most familiar licence.

The University of Helsinki recommends the use of a CC BY licence for open access publishing.

Open ac­cess pub­lish­ing

Open access publishing means making a digital content freely and openly available to the general public.

Open data

Open data is research material that has not yet been analysed and interpreted. Such data is usually in digital format (e.g., measurements), but may also be in analogue format (such as diaries and interviews).

Open edu­ca­tional re­sources

Open educational resources (OER) are materials that can be freely used in teaching, learning or research, such as courses, videos, books, articles or sets of assignments. They may be either non-copyrighted or released under a licence that permits their free use, adaptation or distribution.

OR­CID re­searcher ID

Researchers can use their ORCID ID to link their research output from their entire career to their own profile.

Pay­wall

A paywall restricts the visibility of a publication, only granting access to subscribers.

Most of the scholarly journals and articles available to researchers and students at the University of Helsinki are subscription-based, meaning that they are kept behind a paywall. The licence agreements negotiated by the Library grant access to journals in the University of Helsinki network.

Peer re­view

Peer review is a method adopted in scholarly publishing, in which articles submitted to journals and other publications are reviewed by both the editorial board and outside experts in the field appointed by the editorial board.

The review process may be closed (the reviewer and author are unaware of one another’s identity), semi-open (the reviewer is usually aware of the author’s identity) or open (the parties are aware of one another’s identity).

Per­sist­ent iden­ti­fier

A persistent identifier is a unique string of characters that is stored for the entire life cycle of the document and can be used to unambiguously refer to an object (e.g., DOI, URN).

Plan S

Plan S is an initiative by a coalition supported by, among others, the European Research Council.

According to the principles of Plan S, all publicly funded publications must be made openly accessible as of 1 January 2021.

The plan is supported by the 14 largest European science and research funders (including the Research Council of Finland).

Plat­inum open ac­cess

Platinum open access operates in the same way as gold open access, but instead of the article processing charges being paid by authors, funding is arranged in other ways.

Platinum open access is used in numerous open access journals (e.g. at journal.fi).

Pred­at­ory pub­lisher

A predatory publisher is a journal or other publication that pretends to be scholarly but neglects the responsibilities of scholarly publishers, for example, regarding peer review.

The operations of such journals usually rely on aggressive marketing and article processing charges. Predatory publishers number in the thousands.

Pub­lic­a­tion Forum

Publication Forum is a Finnish rating and classification system, maintained by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, which helps support and develop the classification of scholarly publication channels.

The classification scheme of Publication Forum is not suitable for the assessment of individual researchers ( -- responsible bibliometrics).

Pub­lish­ing plat­form

A publishing platform is a form of infrastructure used to publish research results.

Publishing platforms used at the University of Helsinki include Helda (for theses, dissertations and open access monographs), as well as Ubiquity Press (the platform for Helsinki University Press journals) and Editori (an Open Journal Systems solution), which are used to publish open access journals.

Re­pos­it­ory

A repository is an infrastructure element used to archive digitally published research results.

The repository of the University of Helsinki is called Helda.

Self-archiv­ing

Self-archiving (parallel publishing) means storing a publication in a repository independent of the original publisher, where it is openly accessible to the general public.

At the University of Helsinki, articles are archived in the Helda repository through the TUHAT research database.

If required, the library staff can handle self-archiving on the researcher’s behalf. In this case, the researcher must retain the postprint version of their article (see Article version) and submit it for archiving to the Library’s open access team at openaccess-info@helsinki.fi.