Acceptance date: the date upon which notification is received from the journal editor that the output has been ‘firmly accepted’ (as opposed to ‘provisional’ acceptance dependent on further revisions/review).
Article Processing Charge (APC): a fee paid to a journal to make research articles open access immediately.
Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM)/post-print: The author’s final version of an article, including changes agreed during peer review but without the publisher’s typesetting or logos.
Corresponding author: The author responsible for manuscript correction, correspondence during submission, handling of revisions and re-submission of the revised manuscript.
Creative Commons Licences: Licences which can be used in open access publishing to help authors retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make use of their work. There are several different Creative Commons licences, which allow different types of re-use. See the Creative Commons website.
Embargo period: Restriction imposed by publishers delaying when an article can be made open access.
Gold Open Access: the type of open access where the final published version of an article/conference proceeding is made immediately available by the publisher to download, redistribute, and reuse from the date of publication.
Green Open Access: the type of open access where the Author Accepted version of an article/conference proceeding is made available, usually via an institutional repository such as Goldsmiths Research Online, either immediately on publication or after an embargo period.
Hybrid journal: Journal where subscriptions are still required for access to most of the content, but offer an option to make individual articles available as Open Access after payment of an additional fee by authors, their institutions or research funders.
Institutional repository: Online digital archive of an institution’s research publications.
ISSN: International Standard Serial Number, an 8 digit unique identifying number for journals, magazines and newspapers.
Peer review: the process where experts from a specific field or discipline evaluate the quality of a peer’s research to assess the validity, quality and originality of articles for publication.
Publication date: The earliest date on which the final version of an output is publicly available. This includes early online release so may be earlier than the date of print publication.
Publisher Agreement: When you publish your paper you will probably sign a 'publisher agreement’. This document states your rights as an author, so it is always worthwhile keeping a copy. On the publisher agreement it should state whether you can make your article available on our institutional repository.
Publishers PDF/Version of Record (VoR): the final version of a research output that has been made available by a publisher. This version will have been copy-edited and typeset by the publisher and includes their logos and formatting.
Read & Publish Agreement: also known as a transformative agreement, this is a subscription agreement with a publisher that also includes an amount of Gold Open Access for the institution’s authors.
Research Excellence Framework (REF):The current system for assessing research in UK higher education institutions which is carried out every six or seven years. REF 2014 was the first REF, followed by REF2021, and the third REF is currently underway as REF 2029.
Rights Retention Strategy: Goldsmiths has instituted a Rights Retention Strategy via a Research Publications and Copyright Policy effective 1 January 2025. Rights Retention aims to ensure that authors can make their research publications available on an open access basis without post-publication embargoes. With Rights Retention authors can disseminate their work as widely as possible while also meeting funder and any future REF requirements.
Self-archiving: The process by which an academic author deposits the metadata (bibliographic reference, abstract, etc.) and an electronic full text for one or more of his/her publications in an Open Access repository (like Goldsmiths Research Online).
Third-party copyright: Copyright held by someone other than yourself is known as third-party copyright.