Glossary

The Alfred Wegener Institute is a German polar and marine research institute that operates the PANGAEA repository together with MARUM.

The Allen Institute for AI is a nonprofit research institute that develops Semantic Scholar, a search engine for scientific publications.

Non-commercial open access initiative for Latin America, linked to Redalyc, UNESCO and CLACSO.

ANID is the Chilean agency that funds and coordinates research and development, and takes part in regional networks such as LA Referencia.

Policy of the Chilean agency ANID requiring the articles and data it funds to be published openly, with a data management plan.

ARDC is an Australian agency that runs RAiD, a persistent identifier for research activities, and co-founded the alliance that governs it.

ARK is a persistent identifier that is free to issue, used by libraries, archives and data repositories to link stably to their objects.

An article processing charge (APC) is a fee a journal charges, usually paid by authors or funders, to publish an article in open access.

arXiv is an online server where researchers in physics, mathematics, computer science and other fields post preprints before peer review.

The Barcelona Declaration is a joint commitment by its signatories to make research information open by default.

BASE is an academic search engine that collects records from many repositories through a standard protocol, so people can search them all at once.

Bibliodiversity is the variety of publishers, languages, formats and publishing models that lets knowledge circulate without depending on a few actors.

Bielefeld University is a German university that maintains BASE, a multidisciplinary academic search engine.

The California Digital Library is a collaborative library of the University of California that operates ROR together with Crossref and DataCite.

Nonprofit foundation that runs The Lens.

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance are principles, not a standard: collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics.

CODATA-driven framework that lets data from different domains be combined.

The Center for Open Science is a nonprofit that promotes open science and runs OSF, a platform for projects, preprints and data.

euroCRIS research information exchange model, recommended by the EU to its member states.

CERN is a European research organisation that operates the Zenodo repository with OpenAIRE and leads the InvenioRDM repository software.

The Citation File Format (CITATION.cff) is a plain-text file holding human- and machine-readable citation details for software or datasets.

A citation index is a database that records which publications cite which, so people can trace a work's influence and discover literature.

CKAN is open-source software for building data portals and catalogues, used by many governments to publish open data.

Clarivate is a company that provides the Web of Science citation index and the research management systems Converis and Esploro.

Coalition of research funders, launched in 2018, behind Plan S and its requirement for immediate open access.

COAR is a global confederation of open access repositories that promotes good practice and common standards among them.

COAR Notify is a set of community conventions that lets repositories send notices to external services, such as peer review, and receive theirs.

CoARA is a European coalition, created in 2022, of institutions committed to reforming how research is assessed.

Committee of the International Science Council focused on data, interoperability, policy and capacity.

CodeMeta is a shared metadata vocabulary for software, built on schema.org and JSON-LD, with crosswalks between repository and domain formats.

Converis is a commercial research information system (CRIS) from Clarivate that institutions use to manage their research activity.

CORE is a service that gathers open access full texts from repositories and journals so they can be searched and downloaded.

CoreTrustSeal is a certification showing that a repository meets requirements for storing and preserving data reliably.

US university that hosted and ran arXiv for 25 years, until its independence on 1 July 2026.

Creative Commons is a US nonprofit that publishes the Creative Commons licences and the CC0 public-domain tool for sharing work openly.

A family of six standard public licences that combine conditions such as attribution (BY), share-alike (SA), non-commercial (NC) and no-derivatives (ND).

Non-profit DOI registration agency focused on scholarly publications, the DataCite equivalent for articles.

A CRIS is an information system that links projects, people, organisations and outputs so institutions and funders can manage and report research.

A data management plan is a formal document that describes how a project's data will be handled during the research and after it ends.

Frictionless Data's JSON container for describing datasets in a portable way.

Nonprofit DOI registration agency focused on datasets, software, reports and research platforms.

The DataCite metadata schema defines the fields used to describe an object registered with a DataCite DOI, in a machine-readable format.

Dataverse is open-source software for building repositories that store and share research data; Harvard University develops it.

datos.gob.cl is the Chilean State's open data portal, where public institutions publish datasets that anyone can search and download.

W3C vocabulary for data catalogues, used by dataset search engines.

Standards community that governs the Dublin Core specification and operates as a project of ASIS&T.

Diamond open access is a publishing model that charges neither readers nor authors, and is funded by institutions, consortia or public money.

Digital Commons is a commercial platform that lets universities build their institutional repository; it is owned by Elsevier.

Digital Science is a research technology company that owns Figshare, Dimensions and Symplectic Elements, among other tools.

Commercial, inclusive bibliographic index owned by Digital Science, with no bulk download of its coverage.

Community-curated index of assessed open access journals, operated by the DOAJ Foundation.

Danish nonprofit foundation, governed by its community, that runs and manages DOAJ since the handover from IS4OA.

Persistent identifier for an object — article, dataset, report, platform or software — that resolves to its current location.

Swiss foundation that runs the Global Handle Registry and appoints its Multi-Primary Administrators.

DORA is a 2012 declaration asking that an article not be judged by the impact factor (average citations) of its journal.

DSpace is open-source software for building digital repositories, used by libraries and research institutions.

Dublin Core is a list of 15 basic fields, such as title and author, for describing any resource, used by libraries and repositories.

Elsevier is a commercial scientific publisher that also provides software for universities, such as the Scopus index and the Pure research system.

Espacio Ciencia is Chile's national portal that brings together content from institutional repositories and the ANID repository; ANID runs it.

Esploro is a commercial research information system (CRIS) created by Ex Libris and now owned by Clarivate.

International membership organisation for research information; maintains the CERIF model.

The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union and funds open science infrastructure such as EOSC and OpenAIRE.

EOSC is the European open science cloud: a federated infrastructure of independent services linked together, for sharing research data.

FAIR is a set of guiding principles for making data findable, accessible, interoperable (able to work across systems) and reusable. It is not a standard.

The FAIR4RS Principles adapt the FAIR principles to research software, which is executable, composite and keeps changing.

FAIRsharing is a curated registry of standards, databases and data policies that shows how they relate, to help people apply FAIR.

Commercial repository that publishes content under open licences and mints DataCite DOIs for every record.

Scholarly communication community where the FAIR principles were drafted and publicly disseminated.

Intergovernmental infrastructure for biodiversity data, with global reach.

US technology company that, according to the W3C community group, directly runs the schema.org project.

The Handle System is a protocol that assigns persistent identifiers and resolves them to each object's current location; the DOI runs on top of it.

Harvard is a US university that develops Dataverse, open-source software for data repositories, at its Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

German publishing group that wholly owns Digital Science and holds a majority (50.6%) of Springer Nature.

IGSN is a persistent identifier for physical samples, geological or biological, that makes them citable; it is now issued through DataCite.

Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of Indigenous peoples to decide how data about them are collected, stored, used and shared.

Inria is the French national research institute for digital science and technology; it launched the Software Heritage archive in 2016.

An institutional repository is a repository that a university or research centre runs to collect, preserve and share the output of its own community.

Faculty information, evaluation and academic promotion system, owned by Elsevier since 2022.

Nonprofit that governs the DOI system and is the registration authority for the ISO 26324 standard.

Open source repository software developed collaboratively, with CERN and Northwestern University as its core partners.

NGO that channels funder investment into open research infrastructure, rather than operating infrastructure of its own.

UK non-profit that ran DOAJ before its handover to the DOAJ Foundation, due to complete in mid-2026.

The ISBN is the international standard number that identifies a book; national agencies assign it, coordinated by the International ISBN Agency.

ISO identifier for people and organisations involved in creative work, used by libraries, publishers, databases and rights management bodies.

The ISSN is an international standard number that identifies journals and other serial publications; the ISSN International Centre coordinates it.

JaLC is the Japanese organisation authorised to assign DOIs to publications and research data.

XML tagging suite for journal articles, used by SciELO and Redalyc.

Jisc is a UK charity that runs Open Policy Finder, a service on the open access policies of publishers and funders.

W3C linked data serialisation that underpins schema.org markup and RO-Crate.

Federated network of eleven Latin American countries plus Spain, which aggregates articles and theses (not research data).

Latin American and Caribbean Centre for Health Sciences Information, founding technical partner of SciELO.

Latindex is a cooperative network of national centres that, since 1997, has assessed and given visibility to scientific journals in Ibero-America.

The Linux Foundation is a US 501(c)(6) nonprofit that hosts open technology projects, among them SPDX.

Non-profit organisation that runs DSpace, open source repository software.

MARUM is a marine environmental sciences centre at the University of Bremen that operates PANGAEA together with the Alfred Wegener Institute.

European regional DOI registration agency, mainly focused on publications.

Metadata is data that describes other data (who, what, when, how) so that people and software can find, understand and reuse it.

A metadata standard is an agreement on which fields to use and how to name them so systems describe and share information alike.

US information standards organisation, accredited by ANSI; maintains JATS.

Low-barrier protocol for interoperability between repositories, based on harvesting their metadata.

Open access is a way of publishing that lets anyone read and reuse research online without paying or asking permission.

Open data is data published under an open licence that anyone can use, modify and share for any purpose.

The Open Data Charter is a network that helps governments adopt six international open data principles, the first being open by default.

An open data portal is an online platform where users find and access collections of open data, often those of the organisation that runs it.

The Open Definition, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation, sets out when knowledge, content or data count as open and which licences conform.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a nonprofit that maintains Data Package and the Open Definition, which sets out what counts as open knowledge.

An open licence is a standard legal permission that lets anyone use, modify and share a work, with minimal conditions such as crediting the author.

Open Policy Finder is a Jisc service for looking up the open access policies of publishers and funders; it merges three earlier Sherpa services.

Open science is a set of practices that makes research knowledge, data and methods accessible and reusable for researchers and society.

Shared services and platforms, such as repositories, indexes and identifier systems, that research needs in order to be open.

An open science policy is a formal framework setting rules and support for sharing publications and data, adopted by a state, funder or institution.

The Open Source Definition lists ten criteria a software licence must meet to count as open source; the Open Source Initiative publishes it.

The Open Source Initiative is a US nonprofit, founded in 1998, that maintains the Open Source Definition and approves licences that comply with it.

An open-access mandate is a policy that requires researchers to deposit or publish their results openly, as a condition of their funding or employment.

Open-source software is released under a licence that lets anyone use, study, modify and distribute it for any purpose.

OpenAIRE is a European infrastructure that gathers content from many repositories and links it to its funders, to make it easier to find.

The OpenAIRE guidelines are rules that let repositories, journals and research information systems publish their metadata in a form others can read.

OpenAlex is a free, open catalogue of scientific publications and their citation links, which anyone can download in full.

OpenCitations is a nonprofit infrastructure that publishes data on citations between publications, open and downloadable by anyone.

OpenDOAR is a global directory of open access repositories, to help people find where to deposit or look for content.

Persistent identifier that solves the problem of the same researcher appearing under different written forms of their name.

OSF is a platform for managing research projects and sharing preprints and data; the Center for Open Science runs it.

OurResearch is a nonprofit that builds OpenAlex, an open catalogue of scientific publications.

PANGAEA is a repository that publishes earth and environmental science data, with CoreTrustSeal certification.

Peer review is a process in which independent specialists evaluate a scientific work before publication, to help editors decide whether it is sound.

A persistent identifier is a unique, lasting code that keeps pointing to the same resource even if its address changes, so it can be cited.

Plan S is a requirement from funding agencies that the research they fund be published in open access, immediately and under an open licence.

POSI is a set of 20 principles for the governance, sustainability and insurance of the organisations that run scholarly infrastructure. It is not a standard.

A preprint is a manuscript that authors post on an open server before peer review, to share results with the community more quickly.

Pure is a commercial research information system (CRIS), owned by Elsevier, that universities use to record and manage their research output.

Identifies a research project or activity, not its output; ISO 23527:2022 standard operated by ARDC.

RDA is a community that brings people together in working and interest groups to produce recommendations on research data.

re3data is a registry of research data repositories that helps people choose where to deposit data.

Redalyc is a platform run by a Mexican university that publishes Latin American journals in open access, without charging authors.

RedCLARA is a non-profit organisation that operates the advanced network connecting universities and research centres in Latin America.

RELX is the publicly listed group of which Elsevier is a division.

Repository software is a program that lets an institution set up and run its own digital repository without building it from scratch.

Research assessment is the process of judging the quality and impact of projects, people or institutions to decide funding, hiring and promotion.

Research data management is the set of practices to plan, document, store and share a project's data so that they can be reused.

A research repository is an online service that stores, describes and gives access to publications or data so others can find and reuse them.

Research software is source code, algorithms, scripts, workflows and executables created during the research process or for a research purpose.

ReSA is a fiscally sponsored project working so that research software and the people who build it are recognised and valued in research.

RO-Crate is a specification for packaging research data together with its context and origin, in a self-contained, reusable format.

Community-led, open registry of persistent identifiers for research and funding organisations.

Public research funding agency of the state of São Paulo; created SciELO in 1997 and since 2024 co-funds it with CAPES and CNPq.

Schema.org is a shared vocabulary of tags that lets web search engines understand the content of a page.

Schmidt Sciences is a philanthropic organisation that co-funds the technology modernisation of arXiv since it became independent of Cornell.

Cooperative electronic publishing programme that hosts, marks up and publishes sixteen national journal collections.

Abstract and citation database owned by Elsevier, with content selected by an independent advisory board (CSAB).

SCOSS is a coalition of libraries, funders and consortia that pool funds to sustain existing open science services.

Semantic Scholar is a search engine from the Allen Institute for AI that analyses the text of articles to link them, not only through citations.

Sherpa Romeo was a service that showed what authors could deposit under each publisher's policy; it is now part of Open Policy Finder.

Private foundation that has co-funded arXiv since its independence from Cornell in 2026.

Software Heritage is an open, non-profit infrastructure that collects, preserves and shares the source code of publicly available software.

SPDX is an open standard, ISO/IEC 5962:2021, for describing software components and their licences, with a list of short licence identifiers.

Symplectic Elements is a commercial research information system (CRIS) from Digital Science that institutions use to record their research activity.

The Lens is a search tool that brings scientific literature and patents together in one place, useful for analysing innovation and technology transfer.

The Open University is a British university that develops CORE, a service that gathers open access literature.

TRUST is a set of guiding principles, not a certification: transparency, responsibility, user focus, sustainability and technology for trustworthy repositories.

UAEM is a Mexican university that runs Redalyc, a platform for Latin American journals, with its own tool, Marcalyc.

Global instrument adopted in 2021 by UNESCO member states (193 countries); advisory in nature and not binding.

Mexican public university; founded and hosts Latindex since 1997.

The University of Bologna is an Italian university that hosts the Research Centre for Open Scholarly Metadata and administers OpenCitations.

British university whose Oxford e-Research Centre runs FAIRsharing.

Web standards consortium that develops, among others, JSON-LD and DCAT.

Selective citation index descended from the 1964 Science Citation Index; an editorial team decides which journals are included.

Open, multilingual knowledge base; bibliographic coverage via WikiCite, fully downloadable, CC0.

The World Data System is a programme of the International Science Council that certifies and coordinates trustworthy scientific data repositories.

Free general-purpose repository operated by CERN, with DOIs included.