Glossary

This section is designed to help you understand key concepts and the range of services offered by registered organisations. Use this guide to familiarise with important terminology and gain a clear overview of the information presented in the organisational profiles.

Glossary of terms 

Academic books

A long-form scholarly publication, including monographs, book chapters, edited collections, critical editions, and other long-form scholarly works. Often the result of in-depth academic research making an original contribution to a field of study.

Academic/Scholarly Journals

A serial or periodical publication, with an ISSN in which scholarship relating to either particular academic disciplines or multidisciplinary research is published.

Conference output

This category includes all conference output, with the exception of conference proceedings published with ISSNs (see Academic/Scholarly journal articles above).

Grey literature

Defined as “[t]hat which is produced on all levels of government, academics, business and industry in print and electronic formats, but which is not controlled by commercial publishers" by the Fourth International Conference on Grey Literature (Grey Literature Database. 1999. ‘What Is Grey Literature?’). We use it here to define outputs produced outside of traditional publishing and distribution channels described above.

Institution 

A not-for-profit academic or scholarly organisation. These include but are not limited to research performing organisations (RPOs), Research funding organisations (RFOs), organisations connected to RPOs (university libraries, university presses, faculties, and departments), research institutes, scholarly societies.

Publisher

Organisations responsible for preparing, producing, and distributing scholarly content to the public.This content can take various forms, such as books, journals, and conference proceedings.

Service Provider 

Any entity that provides services and/or infrastructure to authors and publishers for scholarly publishing. These services may be provided by the publisher itself (in which case the publisher is also the service provider) or by other entities inside or outside the institution. Such activities include, but are not limited to: (a) editorial activities (selection of manuscripts, peer-review, etc.); (b) operational activities (production activities like copy editing, proofreading, type-setting, creating metadata), IT activities, communication activities (marketing/dissemination, social media, etc), as well as administrative and financial activities (contracts, accounting, documentation, etc.).

Tools & Technology Provider

Any entity that provides tools and/or technologies such as standards, code, hardware and software that enable any user and service provider to perform specific tasks or operations to achieve their objectives. Such tools and technologies include, but are not limited to, publishing software, format converters, XML and content structuration standards, peer review management systems, editing tools, PIDs, data exchange protocols.

Non-academic outputs

Includes research outputs intended to reach a broader audience beyond academia, such as project information/communication, articles in a newspaper or magazine, interviews and press releases.

Other research outputs and output formats

Includes textual and non-textual research outputs such as Creative writing, Artwork, Sound and video recordings, Exhibition catalogues, Musical score or notation, Datasets, Software, Digital Scholarship, Intellectual Property, Patents/Trademarks Digital or Visual Products, Artefact, Exhibition, Performance, Composition, Design, Devices and Products, and Portfolio works.

Glossary of Services

Content format production: the action of giving a stable form to the published content. 

Copy editing/language editing/proofreading: various actions performed on text content. 

Displaying/Disseminating: the action of publicising content via specific software or platforms. 

Editorial decisions/Peer review management: the actions related to handling manuscripts and correspondence with authors. 

Hosting: the action of controlling the material space on which published content appears. 

Identification: the action of attributing permanent identifiers to content, mostly text, authors and data. 

Income management: the action of applying for, contracting, paying, and accounting monetary resources. 

Indexing: The action of putting data on outputs as books, book series, journals in commercial or open databases like Scopus, DOAB/DOAJ or WoS. 

Intellectual property rights and licensing: actions related to the acquisition, the transfer of content property, and the scope of its uses. 

Marketing: the actions relating to funding streams to support the Publisher or its partners, enhancing audiences, and increasing content outreach.

Metadata production: the action of linking any useful data to content often by software, on the basis of information provided by authors at the time of submission. 

Preservation: the action of archiving and preserving content in the long term. 

Printing: any action related to the production, selling and dissemination of printed material. 

Training: different sets of actions performed by Publishers to improve the skills of their teams or those of associated stakeholders, including editors and authors.