Introduction to Open Access

It is a political process by an individual or group which aims to influence public opinion, public-policy and resource allocation decisions within political, economic, and social systems and institutions. It can include many activities that a person or organization undertakes including media campaigns, public speaking, commissioning and publishing research.

Altmetrics is a new metrics proposed as an alternative to the widely used journal impact factor and personal citation indices such as h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the twitter #altmetrics hashtag.

The article influence determines the average influence of a journal's articles over the first five years after publication. It is calculated by dividing a journal’s EFS by the number of articles in the journal, normalized as a fraction of all articles in all publications.

It is the third commercially available citation index, launched in 1978 by the ISI. Now it is available with the WoS/ WoK platform.

A legal instrument that modifies the publisher's agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles.

A bundle of rights which are part of copyright law, such as right to share, use, reuse, modify, perform and remix.

It is a conceptual approach to development that focuses on understanding the obstacles that inhibit people, governments, international organizations and non-governmental organizations from realizing their developmental goals while enhancing the abilities that will allow them to achieve measurable and sustainable results. It is also referred to as capacity development.

It is a reference to a text or part of a text identifying the document in which it may be found.

It is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in articles and books. It uses citations in scholarly works to establish links to other works or other researchers. It is one of the most widely used methods of bibliometrics.

It is a bibliographic tool in print or electronic format that lists all referenced or cited source items published in a given time span.

 It is a measurement used to estimate the impact of a journal. It is the number of years, going back from the current year, that account for 50% of the total citations received by the cited journal in the current year. ISI developed this calculation to provide an indicator as to the long-term value of source items in a single journal publication.

 The number of journal publication years, going back from the current year that account for 50% of the total citations given by the citing journal in the current year. ISI developed this calculation to provide an indicator of the subtle changes in scope of a publication over the course of time.

It is a pact or treaty among individuals or groups, during which they cooperate in joint action, each in their own self-interest, joining forces together for a common cause. This alliance may be temporary or a matter of convenience.

An arrangement whereby software or artistic work may be used, modified, and distributed freely on condition that anything derived from it is bound by the same conditions.

The exclusive and assignable legal right, given to the originator or creator or author for a fixed number of years, to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material.

An agreement between authors and publishers, where authors transfer some exclusive rights to publishers.

It offers free access after a specified period. A journal will make its articles freely available after a period of time, anywhere from 6 months to 2 years.

In library and archival science context, it is a formal endeavour to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable.

It is based on the number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year, but it also considers which journals have contributed these citations so that highly cited journals will influence the network more than lesser cited journals. References from one article in a journal to another article from the same journal are removed, so that Eigenfactor Scores are not influenced by journal self-citation.

It removes price barriers alone. It is free of charge, but not free of copyright, or licensing restrictions.

It refers to Hirsch’s H-Index, suggested by physicist Jorge E. Hirsch. It is the largest number h such that h publications have at least h citations.

It offers free availability of certain articles written by authors who choose to pay a publication charge or APC to make their articles OA immediately on publication, while the rest of the articles requires a subscription to access.

It, introduced in 2011 by Google Scholar, indicates the number of academic publications an author has written that have at least ten citations from others.

It is an online archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Usually it is in OA.

It is a tool, launched in 1975 by the ISI, for ranking academic journals analysing citations count, journal impact factor and journal immediacy index. Presently it has two annual editions for science and social sciences, based on SCI-E and SSCI.

It is the average number of times that an article published in a specific year within a specific journal is cited over the course of that same year.

It is the number of current citations to articles published in a specific journal in a two year period divided by the total number of articles published in the same journal in the corresponding two year period.

It removes price barriers and at least some permission barriers as well. It is free of charge and expressly permits uses beyond fair use.

An exclusive right authors grant to publishers.

A permission or authorization that ensures licensors get the credit for their work.

It is computer software with its source code made available and licensed with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.

It offers free availability of the journal's primary research articles, but access to other value-added content such as editorials and review articles requires a subscription.

It is a peer-reviewed periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research.

It is the first commercially available citation index, launched in 1964 by the ISI. Now it is available with the WoS/ WoK platform.

It is a prestige metric based on the idea that 'all citations are not created equal'.

It is the world's largest abstracting and citation database of peer-reviewed literature.

It offers free availability of selected articles of a journal issue, while the rest of the issue requires a subscription to access.

It is a reference an author provide in a document to other documents written by himself/ herself.

A common phenomenon to describe the constant increase in subscription cost increases of many scholarly journals.

It provides free access to articles for a short period after publication, after which they are only available to paid subscribers.

It measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field.

It is the second commercially available citation index, launched in 1972 by the ISI. Now it is available with the WoS/ WoK platform.