APC - Article Processing Charge - A fee charged to the author, creator, or institution to cover the cost of an article, rather than charging the potential reader of the article. APCs may apply to both commercial and Open Access publications.
Corresponding Author - The corresponding author is the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer-review, and publication process.
Peer-Review - The independent assessment of your research paper by experts in your field. Its purpose is to evaluate the manuscript’s quality and suitability for publication.
Fully Open Access Journal – A journal that all articles published in it are fully open and freely accessible to the public.
HybridJournal – A subscription journal that some of the articles in it are open access.
Creative Commons (CC) license – a series of copyright licenses which allow authors to license their work for free reuse, with fewer restrictions than all rights reserved. Publishers will apply a CC license (or a similar license with the same effect) as part of the gold open access route. For more information' please check the Creative Commons Organization website.
Gold open access – The process of making the final version of the research output (article) freely available and reusable via the journal or publisher’s website under the terms of a Creative Commons license, usually in exchange for an Article Processing Charge (APC).
Green open access – The process of making the certain preliminary version of the research output (preprint, accepted manuscript, etc.) freely available through a disciplinary repository (e.g., arXiv, PubMed Central) or an institutional repository (e.g., the Weizmann CRIS) at no cost to the author. This process is also known as “self-archiving” and often comes with restrictions requiring the author accepted manuscript and an embargo period.
Preprint – An early draft (aka. "author original", "author's version" or "submitted manuscript"). This term is usually used for a paper that has been submitted to a publisher but has yet to be peer-reviewed or accepted, but some sources may use the term more generally to refer to any draft version of a research output prior to publication. Some repositories, such as arXiv, are known as preprint servers because they contain versions of papers prior to submission or acceptance.
Accepted manuscript – The research paper after peer-review, but not yet formatted by the publisher. Accepted manuscripts may vary from the final published version. Other commonly used terms for accepted manuscripts are "Post-print", "Final draft", "accepted version", or "refereed".
Published version - The final version. Peer-reviewed, published in a journal, and formatted by the publisher. Aka. "publisher's version" or "version of record".
Embargo - Delayed Open Access. Some subscription journals make all their content Open Access after a specified period of time has passed (Bronze Open Access), or allow the author to have their research output become open access after a specified period of time.
Transformative agreement – an agreement between a publisher and institutions encouraging the transition of journals from hybrid to fully open access.
Transformative journal – A Transformative Journal is a subscription or hybrid journal that has committed to transitioning to Fully Open Acces Journal.
Predatoryjournals - Publications that claim to be legitimate scholarly journals, but misrepresent their publishing practices. There are falsely claiming to provide peer review, hiding information about Article Processing Charges (APCs), misrepresenting members of the journal’s editorial board, and other violations of copyright or scholarly ethics. To avoid the damages of predatory journals, authors are advised to publish their papers only in journals that appear in JCR.
For more information on predatory journals and their identification it is recommended to visit the Think Check Submit website
