v2026.1 · 714 entries
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Lab equipment lifecycle assessment
A structured environmental impact assessment of a laboratory instrument or equipment item across all life-cycle stages, from raw-material extraction and manufacture through use, maintenance, and end-of-life.
Carbon accounting (research)
The systematic measurement, calculation, and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions across research activities, applying standard methodologies and emission factors to produce auditable CO2-equivalent totals.
Scope 1 / 2 / 3 emissions (research org)
The categorisation of a research organisation's greenhouse-gas emissions following the GHG Protocol: scope 1 (direct on-site combustion), scope 2 (purchased electricity, heat, steam, cooling), and scope 3 (indirect emissions across the value chain, including procurement, commuting, travel, and waste).
Climate impact statement (in DMP)
A structured section in a data management plan or research proposal that estimates and discusses the environmental impact of planned research activities, including travel, computing, equipment, consumables, and data storage.
Climate-aware funding
Research funding policies and award practices that explicitly incorporate climate and environmental sustainability considerations into eligibility, proposal review, and reporting.
Open infrastructure energy efficiency
The energy and carbon performance of shared, community-governed scholarly infrastructure (open repositories, identifier services, preservation systems), considered as part of the sustainability profile of the open scholarship ecosystem.
Sustainable procurement (research)
The process of purchasing research goods and services with explicit consideration of environmental, social, and governance criteria across the full supply chain, in addition to price and performance.
5R Framework (lab sustainability)
A hierarchical decision framework applied to laboratory consumables and waste: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle, considered in that order of preference.
Hybrid conference
A scholarly meeting that simultaneously supports in-person and remote participation, with intentional design choices to give remote attendees substantive interactivity rather than passive viewing.
Virtual conference
A scholarly meeting held entirely online, with no physical venue or in-person attendance, using video-conferencing, virtual poster halls, and asynchronous discussion channels.
Conference travel emissions
The subset of academic travel emissions specifically attributable to attendance at conferences, workshops, and scholarly meetings.
Travel emissions (academic)
The greenhouse gas emissions arising from academic business travel, principally air travel for conferences, fieldwork, collaboration visits, and external examining.
Carbon-aware computing
The practice of scheduling, shifting, or routing computational workloads in response to real-time grid carbon intensity, so that flexible jobs run when and where electricity emissions are lowest.
Energy proportionality (computing)
The property of computing systems whose energy consumption scales linearly with workload, so that idle or lightly utilised systems draw correspondingly little power.
Green software engineering
The discipline of designing, building, and operating software with explicit attention to its energy and carbon impact, as defined by the Green Software Foundation.
Sustainable HPC
High-performance computing operations and procurement choices that minimise energy use, carbon emissions, water use, and hardware waste while delivering scientific compute capacity.
Compute carbon footprint
The greenhouse gas emissions attributable to the electricity consumed by computational research activities, including local workstations, on-premises HPC clusters, and cloud or commercial compute services.
Research carbon footprint
The total greenhouse gas emissions (expressed in CO2-equivalent) attributable to research activity, encompassing direct laboratory energy use, computing, procurement, travel, and end-of-life of research equipment.
Lab waste audit
A structured exercise in which a laboratory measures and categorises the volume, type, and disposal route of waste generated over a defined period to identify reduction, re-use, and recycling opportunities.
Single-use plastic alternatives
Materials and product designs that substitute for traditional single-use polymer consumables in research workflows, including bio-based polymers, autoclavable glassware, reduced-plastic packaging, and refill-and-wash systems.
Reusable consumables
Laboratory items historically used once and discarded that are redesigned, repurposed, or substituted with multi-use alternatives, including washable tip-box racks, autoclavable glass tubes, refillable spray bottles, and washable lab coats.
Plastic waste (research lab)
The single-use and multi-use polymer waste generated by laboratory research activities, including pipette tips, tubes, plates, gloves, packaging, and serological pipettes, much of which is contaminated and routed to incineration rather than recycling.
-80 degC freezer management
The set of operational practices applied to ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezers to minimise energy use, extend equipment life, and preserve sample integrity, including sample inventory control, temperature setpoint optimisation, and preventive maintenance.
Cold-storage energy (research)
The electrical energy consumed by research cold-storage equipment (-20 degC freezers, -80 degC ultra-low temperature freezers, liquid nitrogen Dewars, cold rooms) used to preserve biological, chemical, and reagent samples.
ULAB sample
An Unknown Long-Abandoned Biological sample, typically held in a freezer or cold-storage facility with no current owner, provenance record, or active research use, representing a major target for sustainability clean-out programmes.
Green Lab Certification
Any formal third-party assessment that verifies a laboratory meets defined sustainability criteria, most commonly issued by LEAF or My Green Lab.
My Green Lab
A US-based non-profit organisation and certification programme that assesses laboratory sustainability across behaviour, equipment, infrastructure, and culture, issuing tiered certifications used by pharmaceutical, biotech, and academic labs worldwide.
LEAF (Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework)
A standards-based assessment framework developed by University College London that scores wet and dry laboratories on energy, waste, water, procurement, and research-quality practices, awarding Bronze, Silver, or Gold accreditation.
Updated project plan
A revised version of the original project plan, reflecting approved changes to scope, work packages, milestones, deliverables, budget, or timeline, typically produced after a project pivot, change request, or extension.
Project plan
The structured document, typically created in the proposal or award-acceptance phase, describing the project's objectives, methods, work packages, tasks, milestones, deliverables, timeline, budget, team, and risks.
Project metadata
The structured descriptive data about a research project, including title, abstract, dates, funder, award number, PI, contributors, institutions, scope, keywords, outputs, and identifiers (RAiD, ORCID, ROR, DOI), used for discovery, reporting, and linkage.
Project ID (RAiD-anchored)
A persistent, machine-actionable identifier for a research project, typically issued under the Research Activity Identifier (RAiD) standard ISO 23527, used to unambiguously identify the project across systems, funders, institutions, and outputs.
Output legacy planning
The explicit planning, typically conducted late in execution and at closeout, for the long-term stewardship, accessibility, and re-use of project outputs (data, software, publications, prototypes, networks) beyond the project's funded lifetime.
Post-project sustainability
The planning and provision for ongoing maintenance, hosting, support, or further development of project outputs (software, datasets, networks, services, communities) after the funded project has formally ended.
Lessons learned
A structured retrospective summary of what worked well, what did not, and what the project team would do differently, captured at major lifecycle milestones (especially closeout) to inform future projects.
Project closure documentation
The set of documents produced at project closeout to record final outcomes, lessons learned, deliverables submitted, data archived, equipment disposition, and outstanding obligations, providing an auditable trail for future reference.
Offboarding (project)
The structured process of transitioning a team member out of a project, including knowledge transfer, data and code hand-off, access revocation, exit interview, and documentation of outstanding items.
Onboarding (project)
The structured process of integrating a new team member, partner, or contributor into a project, including orientation to scope, methods, tools, data, governance, and team norms.
Hand-off (between phases)
The structured transfer of project responsibility, knowledge, and artefacts from one lifecycle phase to the next, or between project teams or roles, to ensure continuity and minimise loss of context.
Project hold
A temporary pause of project activity initiated by the project team, the institution, or a regulatory body, for example pending an ethics re-approval, equipment repair, IRB decision, or while a key team member is on leave.
Continuation decision
The sponsor's formal determination, typically at the end of a reporting period, of whether to continue funding the next budget period of a multi-year grant, based on satisfactory progress and continued funding availability.
Suspension (grant)
The temporary halting of a grant's activities, typically initiated by the sponsor in response to a concern (compliance, ethical, or financial), during which new obligations cannot be incurred against the award and previously incurred costs may be at risk.
Termination (grant)
The formal ending of a grant award before its scheduled end date, initiated by the sponsor or recipient, due to non-performance, mutual agreement, loss of funding, or other defined cause.
No-cost extension (lifecycle context)
A formal extension of the project's period of performance beyond the original end date, with no additional sponsor funds, used to complete the funded scope when execution has been delayed or remaining funds support continued work.
Change request (project)
A formal request submitted to a sponsor to amend an aspect of an awarded project, such as scope, budget allocation, personnel, equipment, or timeline, typically requiring sponsor review and approval before the change takes effect.
Project pivot
A substantive change in the direction, methods, scope, or objectives of a research project, motivated by new findings, external developments, technical obstacles, or strategic re-evaluation, typically requiring formal sponsor approval.
End-of-project review
A formal review held at or near the end of the project's period of performance, assessing overall achievement of objectives, deliverables produced, impact, and lessons learned.
Mid-term review
A formal review conducted at approximately the midpoint of a research project, evaluating progress against aims, resource utilisation, and the realism and feasibility of the plan for the remaining project duration.
Interim project review
A scheduled formal review of project progress conducted at a defined intermediate point in the project lifecycle, typically combining sponsor, consortium, and (sometimes) independent expert evaluation.
Annual report (grant)
A scheduled interim report submitted to the sponsor once per project year, summarising progress, deliverables, expenditure, personnel, and any deviations, supporting continuation decisions for multi-year awards.
Archive phase
The post-closeout lifecycle phase during which project records, datasets, code, and documentation are deposited in appropriate repositories for long-term preservation, access, and possible re-use.
Reporting phase
The lifecycle phase or sub-phase during which scheduled progress and financial reports are prepared and submitted to the sponsor, typically overlapping with later execution and closeout.
Execution phase
The main project lifecycle phase during which the planned research activities are carried out, deliverables produced, milestones achieved, and the bulk of grant expenditure occurs.
Award phase
The lifecycle phase between sponsor decision to fund and start of the period of performance, covering notification, negotiation of terms, contracting, ethics and other compliance approvals, and project mobilisation.
Proposal phase
The lifecycle phase covering preparation, drafting, internal review, institutional approval, and submission of a research proposal to a funder, ending with proposal submission.
Idea phase
The earliest phase of the research project lifecycle, in which a researcher identifies a question, surveys the literature, drafts a research concept, and explores potential funders and collaborators before committing to proposal preparation.
Project lifecycle
The complete sequence of phases through which a research project progresses from initial idea through proposal, award, execution, reporting, closeout, and post-project legacy.
Subtask
An internal subdivision of a project task, used for detailed planning, effort tracking, and execution management, typically not formally reported to the sponsor but tracked within the consortium or research group.
Task (Horizon Europe)
A subdivision of a Horizon Europe work package, representing a specific activity with defined objectives, contributing partners, person-month allocation, and link to particular deliverables or milestones.
Work package (Horizon Europe)
A defined sub-component of a Horizon Europe project that groups related tasks, deliverables, and milestones under a single work-package leader, with its own budget allocation and timeline.
Project deliverable
A tangible, verifiable output produced by a project, such as a report, dataset, software release, prototype, or publication, formally documented in the project plan with a due date and responsible work package or partner.
Project milestone
A significant intermediate point in a project, marking achievement of a key activity, completion of a deliverable, or successful transition between phases, used to monitor progress against the project plan.
Project phase
A defined segment of a research project's lifecycle, characterised by a specific objective, set of activities, deliverables, and decision gates, used to structure planning, execution, and reporting.
Financial report (grant)
A structured statement of grant expenditure submitted to the sponsor at defined reporting periods, presenting actual costs against the approved budget by category and supporting reimbursement or continuation decisions.
Final report
The concluding report submitted to the sponsor at or shortly after the end of the period of performance, summarising the entire project's achievements, deliverables, publications, financial summary, and outcomes.
Interim report
A progress and/or financial report submitted to the sponsor during a multi-period grant, covering activities up to a defined intermediate point and supporting continuation decisions.
Reporting period (grant)
A defined time window within a multi-period grant for which the recipient must submit progress and/or financial reports to the sponsor, often aligned with budget years or work-package completion dates.
Lump-sum grant (Horizon Europe)
A Horizon Europe funding model in which a fixed lump-sum amount is paid for completion of each work package, replacing detailed cost-actuals reporting with focus on technical deliverables and successful work-package completion.
Milestone payment
A funding disbursement triggered by the achievement of a defined project milestone, used in fixed-price or hybrid funding mechanisms to align sponsor payment with verifiable progress.
Fixed-price grant
A grant or contract in which the sponsor pays a pre-agreed fixed amount on satisfactory completion of the work or defined milestones, without reimbursement of actual costs, transferring cost-overrun risk to the recipient.
Cost reimbursement
A funding mechanism in which the sponsor reimburses the recipient for actual allowable costs incurred during the performance of the award, typically up to a stated funding ceiling, with periodic invoicing and supporting documentation required.
Pass-through entity
A non-federal entity that receives a federal award from a federal awarding agency and then provides a subaward to a subrecipient to carry out part of the federal programme.
Prime award
The grant or contract directly between the funder and the lead recipient organisation, which holds primary responsibility for the project's scope, deliverables, and compliance, and may issue subawards to other entities.
Subrecipient monitoring
The activities undertaken by the prime award recipient (pass-through entity) to ensure that subrecipients comply with the terms of their subawards, including financial, programmatic, and audit oversight.
Subaward
A formal award by the prime recipient of a grant to another organisation to perform a defined portion of the substantive scope of work, governed by terms flowing down from the prime award.
Sponsored research agreement
A contractual agreement between a research-performing organisation and a sponsor (industry, foundation, or government), defining the scope of work, deliverables, IP terms, publication rights, payment terms, and reporting obligations for a research project.
Crowdfunded research
Research projects funded by aggregated small contributions from many individuals, typically solicited through online platforms (Experiment, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, institutional giving sites) rather than from traditional grant-making bodies.
Endowment income
The investment returns generated by an institution's or foundation's permanent endowment fund, used (typically at a defined spending rate, e.g., 4 to 5 percent of a multi-year smoothed average) to support operations, scholarships, or named research programmes.
Foundation grant
A grant awarded by a private, charitable, or family foundation rather than a government agency or industry sponsor, typically funded from endowment income and governed by the foundation's mission and giving guidelines.
Indirect cost recovery
The income an institution receives from sponsors as reimbursement for indirect (overhead) costs incurred in support of sponsored projects, calculated by applying the negotiated or sponsor-imposed indirect cost rate to the relevant direct-cost base.
Single Audit (US)
A US federal annual organisation-wide audit required of non-federal entities expending more than a defined threshold of federal funds, conducted under 2 CFR 200 Subpart F (formerly OMB Circular A-133).
Audit (grant)
A formal examination of an institution's or project's financial records, internal controls, and compliance with sponsor terms, conducted by external or internal auditors to provide independent assurance of proper stewardship of grant funds.
Closeout phase
The grant lifecycle phase following the end of the period of performance, during which final technical, financial, equipment, and property reports are submitted, residual obligations are liquidated, and the award is formally closed.
Post-award phase
The grant lifecycle phase covering all activities between the start of the period of performance and the end of the closeout reporting period, including expenditure, reporting, monitoring, modifications, and subaward management.
Pre-award phase
The grant lifecycle phase covering activities from identification of a funding opportunity through proposal preparation, submission, and award negotiation, prior to the start of the period of performance.
Encumbrance
A reservation or commitment of grant funds against a future expenditure (such as a purchase order, a multi-year salary commitment, or a subaward), recorded in the institution's financial system to prevent over-commitment.
Burn rate (grant)
The rate at which a grant's funds are being expended over time, typically expressed as currency-per-month or as a percentage of the budget consumed per period, used to forecast end-of-period spend and identify under- or over-spend trajectories.
Underspend
The condition in which a grant budget period ends with unspent funds, indicating actual expenditure was lower than planned and requiring action (carry-forward, reduction of next-year award, or return to sponsor).
Carry-forward
The authorised transfer of unobligated grant funds from one budget period to the next within a multi-year grant, allowing the recipient to use those funds in a subsequent period rather than losing them.
No-cost extension (NCE)
An approved extension of the period of performance of a grant beyond the original end date, without additional sponsor funds, to enable completion of the funded scope.
Continuation award
The release of subsequent-year segments of a multi-year grant, contingent on satisfactory progress and the availability of funds, but not requiring a new competitive application.
Renewable award
A funding award that, on completion, may be extended or re-funded for additional periods through a renewal process, which is typically partly competitive (against other proposals) and partly based on performance of the prior award.
Discretionary funding
Funds that an institution, dean, or unit head may allocate at their own judgement, without a formal competitive call, typically used for strategic investments, recruitment startups, bridge support, or unforeseen needs.
Non-competitive grant
A funding award made without a comparative peer-reviewed competition, either through direct invitation, formula allocation, or as a routine continuation of an existing multi-year award.
Competitive grant
A funding award made following a peer-reviewed, merit-based competition against other proposals, in which only a subset of applicants are funded.
Catalyst grant
A targeted, often small-to-medium-value funding mechanism designed to catalyse strategic activity in a specific area, such as building a new research network, piloting a methodology, or de-risking a translational step.
Pump-priming funding
Small grants intended to initiate new collaborative or interdisciplinary research activity that is not yet ready for full external funding competition, typically with an explicit expectation of follow-on external grant capture.
Seed funding
Small-value, short-duration funding awarded to develop a novel research idea to the point where it can compete for larger external grants, typically provided by institutions, learned societies, or pilot-grant programmes.
Bridge funding
Short-term funding provided to maintain a research programme between an expiring grant and an anticipated new award, typically from institutional sources rather than external sponsors.
Match funding
A funding model in which one party's contribution is conditional on a matching contribution from another party, typically expressed as a ratio (e.g., 1:1, 2:1) of sponsor funds to recipient or third-party funds.
Cost share (voluntary)
A contribution to a sponsored project beyond what the sponsor requires, committed by the recipient institution typically to strengthen a proposal's competitiveness or demonstrate institutional support.
Cost share (mandatory)
A contribution to a sponsored project that is required by the sponsor as a condition of the award and must be documented, tracked, and reported, typically as a percentage of total project cost or as a specific dollar value.
Direct charging
The practice of charging a specific cost directly to a sponsored project's budget as a direct cost rather than recovering it through the indirect cost rate, when the cost meets allowability, allocability, and reasonableness criteria.
APC reimbursement (funder)
The mechanism by which a research funder repays an article processing charge (APC) paid by an author or institution, either directly or via an institutional block grant, in support of open access publication of grant-supported research.
Open access publication cost (grant-eligible)
The portion of a grant budget allocated to fund open access publication of project outputs, including article processing charges (APCs), book-processing charges (BPCs), and related fees, where the sponsor permits such costs as direct or supplemental expenditure.
Travel cost (grant)
The portion of a grant budget allocated to project-related travel, including transportation, accommodation, meals, and subsistence for project personnel attending fieldwork, conferences, collaboration meetings, and dissemination events.
Equipment cost (grant)
The portion of a grant budget allocated to the purchase, fabrication, or lease of equipment with a useful life beyond a single budget period and a per-unit cost exceeding the institutional capitalisation threshold.
Personnel cost (grant)
The portion of a grant budget that pays the salaries, wages, and associated benefits of staff working on the project, typically the largest single category in most research grants.
Single-year project
A funded research project whose period of performance is one year or less, with a single budget period and a single reporting cycle (interim if applicable, plus final).
Multi-year project
A funded research project whose period of performance extends across more than one year, typically structured with annual budget periods, interim reporting, and continuation reviews.
Grant Agreement (Horizon Europe)
The legally binding contract signed between the European Commission (or designated funding body) and the beneficiaries, defining the action's scope, budget, deliverables, payment, IP, reporting, and dissemination obligations for a Horizon Europe project.
Consortium agreement
A legal agreement signed among all beneficiaries in a multi-partner grant, regulating their internal relationships (governance, IP, confidentiality, financial flows, conflict resolution) in complement to the Grant Agreement with the funder.
Partner (grant consortium)
A non-coordinator beneficiary in a multi-partner grant consortium, responsible for an agreed share of the work and budget and party to the consortium agreement.
Coordinator (grant consortium)
The beneficiary in a multi-partner grant (especially Horizon Europe) that takes legal and administrative lead, acting as the single point of contact with the funder and coordinating consortium activities, reporting, and payments.
Beneficiary (Horizon Europe)
A legal entity that signs the Horizon Europe Grant Agreement and is directly accountable to the European Commission for delivery of an agreed share of the project's work and budget.
MTDC (Modified Total Direct Cost)
The base to which a US federal indirect cost rate is applied, equal to total direct costs minus excluded items (typically equipment over a threshold, capital expenditures, patient care, tuition remission, rental costs, scholarships, and the portion of each subaward exceeding $25,000).
De minimis rate (NIH)
A federally permitted 10 percent indirect cost rate that organisations without a negotiated F&A rate may elect to use on US federal awards, applied to modified total direct costs (MTDC).
F&A rate (Facilities & Administrative)
The negotiated percentage rate applied to a defined direct-cost base to recover an institution's facilities and administrative (indirect) costs on US federal grants and contracts.
Indirect costs (overheads)
Project costs that cannot be specifically attributed to a single research activity but are necessary to support the conduct of research, including facilities, administration, libraries, IT, and depreciation, recovered from sponsors through an indirect cost rate.
Direct costs
Project costs that can be specifically and unambiguously attributed to a single sponsored research activity, including project-specific personnel salaries, materials and consumables, equipment, travel, and subaward costs.
Implementation science
The scientific study of methods to promote the systematic uptake of research findings and other evidence-based practices into routine practice, with the aim of improving the quality and effectiveness of services and outcomes.
Bench-to-bedside
A phrase used in biomedical research to describe the translation of laboratory ('bench') discoveries into clinical practice ('bedside'), encompassing the T1 stage of translational research.
Translational research
Research that bridges discovery science and practical application, translating findings from laboratory or theoretical work into improvements in clinical care, policy, products or services.
Action research
A research approach in which researchers and practitioners work together to investigate a practical problem and develop solutions through iterative cycles of planning, action, observation and reflection.
Community-based participatory research (CBPR)
A collaborative research approach that equitably involves community members, organisational representatives and researchers in all aspects of the research process, with shared decision-making and the aim of combining knowledge with action for social change.
Lived-experience expert
A person whose personal experience of a condition, situation or issue is recognised as a form of expertise that contributes meaningfully to research, policy or practice alongside professional and academic expertise.
Co-design (research)
The collaborative design of research studies, interventions, services or products with the people who will use them or be affected by them, integrating their knowledge and perspectives from the outset.
Co-production (research)
Research carried out as an equal partnership between researchers and those who are intended to use, benefit from or be affected by the research, in which knowledge is generated together.
Engagement metric
A quantitative or structured-qualitative indicator capturing the extent, depth, reach or quality of engagement between researchers and non-academic stakeholders or publics.
Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)
A framework that asks research and innovation actors to anticipate and assess potential implications and societal expectations of their work, with a view to fostering the design of inclusive and sustainable outcomes.
Mission-oriented research
Research designed to achieve specific, time-bound, ambitious societal missions, drawing on multiple disciplines and stakeholder partnerships, in the tradition argued for by Mariana Mazzucato.
SDG-aligned research
Research that is explicitly designed, framed or assessed in relation to specific Sustainable Development Goals and their targets, with the intent of contributing to their achievement.
SDG 17 (Partnerships)
The seventeenth Sustainable Development Goal: strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development.
SDG 9 (Industry Innovation)
The ninth Sustainable Development Goal: build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation.
SDG 4 (Quality Education)
The fourth Sustainable Development Goal: ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
SDG mapping (research output)
The practice of classifying research outputs, projects or programmes against one or more Sustainable Development Goals or targets, to understand alignment, track contributions, and communicate research relevance.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The 17 global goals adopted by all United Nations member states in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, addressing interlinked global challenges including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice.
ECSA (European Citizen Science Association)
A European network of citizen-science practitioners, researchers and project owners that promotes the practice, quality and recognition of citizen science across Europe and internationally.
Citizen science
Research in which members of the general public actively participate in the scientific process, including problem framing, data collection, analysis or dissemination, often at large scale and with substantive contribution.
Patient partner
A patient, service user, carer or member of the public who is actively involved in shaping and conducting research as a recognised partner, typically with named role, compensation and decision-making influence.
Patient and Public Involvement (PPI)
Research being carried out 'with' or 'by' members of the public rather than 'to', 'about' or 'for' them, as defined by INVOLVE (the UK national advisory group for PPI).
Public engagement with research (PER)
A subset of public engagement focused specifically on engaging publics with research processes and outcomes, distinguished from public engagement with science or with higher education more broadly.
Public engagement (PE)
The myriad ways in which the activity and benefits of higher education and research can be shared with the public, often involving two-way interaction to generate mutual benefit, as defined by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE).
Knowledge exchange (KE)
A two-way process through which knowledge, ideas and experiences are shared between researchers and non-academic partners (such as businesses, public services, third sector, communities) to mutual benefit.
Knowledge mobilisation (KMb)
The processes by which research evidence and other forms of knowledge are made accessible, useful and used by communities, practitioners, policymakers and other stakeholders to inform decisions and action.
Knowledge translation (KT)
The dynamic and iterative process that includes synthesis, dissemination, exchange and ethically sound application of knowledge to improve health and provide more effective health services and products, as defined by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Pathway to impact
An articulated sequence of activities, intermediate outcomes and stakeholder engagements through which research findings are expected to translate into beneficial change beyond academia.
Theory of change
An explicit, testable map of how and why a research project, programme or intervention is expected to lead to specified outcomes, identifying the causal pathway and necessary intermediate conditions.
Impact evaluation
The systematic assessment of whether and how a research output, programme or portfolio has produced specific effects beyond academia.
Impact case study (REF)
See 'REF impact case study' (responsible-assessment). A structured narrative documenting how specific research has produced effects beyond academia, submitted as part of UK Research Excellence Framework assessment.
Environmental impact
The contribution that research makes to environmental outcomes, including biodiversity, conservation, ecosystem services, climate, pollution reduction, sustainability and resource use.
Cultural impact
The contribution that research makes to cultural understanding, heritage, the arts, creative industries, and the ways societies make meaning of their past, present and future.
Policy impact
The contribution that research makes to the formulation, content or implementation of public policy at local, national or international levels.
Economic impact
The contribution that research makes to the economy, including productivity gains, new products and services, cost savings, employment, gross-value-added effects and competitiveness.
Societal impact
The contribution that research makes to society in terms of changes to social practices, public attitudes, community wellbeing, civic engagement, equity, or quality of life.
Academic impact
The contribution that research makes to the advancement of scientific knowledge and to other research communities, typically evidenced through citations, methods uptake, theoretical influence and training of researchers.
Research impact
The demonstrable contribution that research makes to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life beyond academia.
OA monitoring
The systematic measurement and reporting of open-access publication uptake, compliance with OA policies, and progression toward open scholarship goals at institutional, funder or national level.
Knowledge equity index
A composite measure or framework that quantifies how equitably knowledge production, dissemination and access are distributed across geographies, languages, disciplines, demographics or career stages.
Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI)
A set of principles published in 2015 (updated 2020) by Bilder, Lin and Neylon defining the governance, sustainability and insurance characteristics that scholarly infrastructure should have to be considered open and community-controlled.
Open infrastructure (POSI principles)
Scholarly infrastructure that is community-governed, financially sustainable, and operationally transparent, in alignment with the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI).
Institutional waiver programme
A structured arrangement by a publisher or institution that grants reductions or full waivers of article-processing or publication charges to authors who would otherwise face financial barriers to open-access publication.
Author fee equity
The principle that author-side publication charges (APCs, page charges, submission fees) should not act as a barrier to publication, with equitable access ensured through waivers, transformative agreements, diamond OA alternatives or funder support.
Predatory journal
A journal that solicits and accepts manuscripts in exchange for fees without providing the editorial and peer-review services normally expected of a legitimate scholarly venue, often through deceptive marketing.
Multilingual scholarship
Scholarly communication that recognises, supports and produces research outputs in multiple languages, in contrast to English-only norms that dominate international academic publishing.
Geographic editorial diversity
The presence on a journal's editorial board, reviewer pool and authorship of researchers from a wide range of countries, regions and institutional types, especially including the Global South.
Equitable peer review
Peer-review practice that actively addresses structural inequities in reviewer recruitment, manuscript handling, language fairness and decision-making, to ensure that authors from under-represented regions, languages and demographics receive fair evaluation.
Global-South publishing
Scholarly publishing originating from, owned by or serving researchers and communities in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, the Pacific and other regions historically marginalised by Northern publishing infrastructures.
Plataforma S
An Iberoamerican open-science platform initiative aligning regional scholarly publishing infrastructures (Redalyc, AmeliCA, SciELO, Latindex) toward shared standards for diamond OA, multilingualism and data interoperability.
AfricArXiv
A community-led preprint repository for African researchers, established in 2018, providing a publishing venue for African scholarship in multiple African languages alongside English and French.
African Open Science Platform (concept)
A continental initiative coordinated by the African Academy of Sciences, NRF South Africa and partners, working to develop open-science infrastructure, policies and capacity across African research institutions.
AmeliCA (concept)
Open Knowledge for Latin America and the Global South, a multi-institutional initiative launched in 2018 that develops infrastructure, policies and advocacy for non-commercial, community-led open-access scholarly communication.
SciELO (concept)
Scientific Electronic Library Online, an open-access publishing model and bibliographic database founded in Brazil in 1997, now a network of country collections across Latin America, the Caribbean, South Africa and beyond.
Redalyc (concept)
A non-profit scientific information system, founded in 2003 at UAEM Mexico, that hosts and disseminates peer-reviewed open-access journals from Iberoamerica and beyond.
Latindex (concept)
A regional online information system for scientific journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal, established in 1997 and coordinated from UNAM, Mexico.
Bibliodiversity (DOAJ/AmeliCA/Redalyc)
The principle that the global scholarly publishing ecosystem should support a plurality of languages, disciplines, geographies, business models and editorial communities, as articulated by initiatives such as DOAJ, AmeliCA, Redalyc and the Jussieu Call.
Pure publish agreement
A contract between an institution or consortium and a publisher that covers only the open-access publication of the institution's authors, without bundled subscription reading access.
Pure read agreement
A traditional subscription contract giving an institution access to read a publisher's content, with no open-access publishing component, in contrast to a transformative or pure publish agreement.
Transformative agreement (TA)
A time-limited contract between an institution or consortium and a publisher designed to shift the financial flow from subscription-based payment for access to payment for open-access publication, with the intent of converting subscription journals to fully OA.
Read-and-Publish agreement
An agreement between an institution or consortium and a publisher that bundles the costs of reading subscription content with the costs of open-access publishing by the institution's authors in the publisher's journals into a single negotiated price.
Subscribe-to-Open (S2O)
A business model in which a journal flips to open access for a given year if enough institutional subscribers renew their subscriptions, with the same subscription price funding open publication instead of access control.
Diamond open access
A publication model in which scholarly content is freely available to read with no charges to either readers or authors, typically supported by institutional, scholarly-society or public funding.
Plan U (Preprint)
A 2019 proposal that funders mandate deposit of preprints in approved preprint servers as a route to immediate open access, complementing Plan S.
cOAlition S
An international consortium of research funders, launched in 2018 by Science Europe, that collectively implements Plan S and advocates for full and immediate open access to research publications.
Plan S
An open-access publishing policy launched in September 2018 by cOAlition S requiring that, from January 2021, scholarly publications resulting from research funded by member organisations be made openly available immediately upon publication under an open licence.
Re-evaluation cycle
A scheduled, periodic review by a research-assessment system of its own indicators, criteria and processes to identify drift, unintended consequences and opportunities for reform.
Lifetime contribution lens
An assessment approach that evaluates a researcher's contributions across their whole career, rather than within a fixed recent window, especially for senior recognition such as fellowships, honours and emeritus appointments.
Career diversity
Recognition in research assessment of diverse career paths, trajectories and mobility patterns, including industry experience, intersectoral mobility, career breaks, part-time work and non-linear progression.
Process diversity (in assessment)
Recognition in research assessment of the diverse research processes researchers contribute to, including teaching, mentoring, peer review, leadership, software engineering, data curation, public engagement and policy work.
Output diversification
The recognition in research assessment of a wide range of research outputs beyond journal articles, including datasets, software, protocols, registered reports, policy briefs, creative works and practitioner publications.
Peer review (in assessment)
The use of expert qualitative judgement by relevant peers to evaluate research outputs, researchers, proposals or environments, distinct from peer review of journal manuscripts.
Quantitative-qualitative balance
The principle in responsible assessment that quantitative indicators should support, not supplant, qualitative expert judgement and that both forms of evidence should be combined transparently.
Responsible metrics
An approach to using quantitative indicators in research assessment that emphasises robustness, humility, transparency, diversity and reflexivity, as articulated in the 2015 Metric Tide report.
Twitter mentions (concept)
An altmetric signal counting public posts on Twitter (rebranded to X in 2023) that include a link or identifier referring to a specific research output.
Mendeley readership
An altmetric signal derived from the count of users who have added a research article to their personal library in the Mendeley reference manager.
Relative Citation Ratio (RCR, NIH)
An article-level field-normalised citation metric developed by the US National Institutes of Health, expressing an article's citations per year relative to the median in the article's co-citation network, with a value of 1.0 corresponding to NIH-funded median performance.
Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI)
An article-level citation indicator, published by Elsevier (SciVal/Scopus), that normalises an article's citation count against the average for outputs of the same publication year, document type and subject field, with 1.0 representing the world average.
Article-level metrics
Indicators reported at the level of an individual article rather than the journal in which it was published, typically including citations, views, downloads, saves and altmetric signals.
Altmetrics
A family of indicators that capture attention to and engagement with research outputs across non-traditional sources such as social media, news outlets, policy documents, blogs, Wikipedia and reference managers.
h-index
A researcher-level metric proposed by Jorge Hirsch in 2005, defined as the largest number h such that the researcher has published h papers each cited at least h times.
CiteScore
A journal-level metric published by Elsevier (Scopus) since 2016 that measures the average number of citations received in a given year by documents published in that journal during the previous four years.
Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
An annual journal-level metric, published by Clarivate in the Journal Citation Reports, equal to the average number of citations in a given year to articles published in that journal during the preceding two years.
Personal statement (research assessment)
A short narrative section in a researcher CV, grant application or assessment dossier in which the researcher explains, in their own voice, the context, motivation and significance of their work and contributions.
Biosketch (NIH-style)
A five-page structured CV format mandated by the US National Institutes of Health for grant applications, organised around a personal statement, positions and honours, contributions to science, and a research-support section.
R4RI mandate (UKRI 2024)
The UK Research and Innovation policy, fully effective in 2024, requiring applicants and reviewers in most UKRI funding opportunities to use the R4RI-derived narrative CV ('Resume for Research and Innovation') instead of traditional academic CVs.
R4RI (Resume for Researchers / Royal Society narrative CV)
A narrative-style CV template originally developed by the Royal Society in 2019 that captures a researcher's contributions across four modules rather than relying on a list of publications and metrics.
REF 2029
The next planned cycle of the UK Research Excellence Framework, currently scheduled with a submission deadline in 2028 and results in 2029, with substantial design changes following the Future Research Assessment Programme.
REF 2021
The 2021 cycle of the UK Research Excellence Framework, whose results were published in May 2022, assessing research produced between 2014 and 2020.
REF impact case study
A structured narrative submission to the REF describing how research from a UK institution has produced demonstrable effects, change or benefit beyond academia.
REF (Research Excellence Framework, UK)
The UK's national exercise for assessing the quality of research in higher education institutions, used to inform the selective allocation of quality-related (QR) research funding.
Metric Tide Review
The 2022-2023 re-examination of the original Metric Tide report, also chaired by James Wilsdon for Research England, which reviewed how responsible-metrics principles had been implemented since 2015.
Metric Tide Report
The 2015 independent review of the role of metrics in UK research assessment, commissioned by HEFCE and chaired by James Wilsdon, which introduced the concept of 'responsible metrics'.
Leiden Manifesto
A 2015 set of ten principles for the responsible use of quantitative indicators in research evaluation, authored by Hicks, Wouters, Waltman, de Rijcke and Rafols.
Hong Kong Principles for Assessing Researchers
A set of five principles published in 2020 to guide the assessment of researchers in ways that reward research integrity and trustworthy practice rather than productivity alone.
CoARA Agreement
The 2022 Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment that sets out ten commitments members of CoARA undertake to implement in their evaluation policies and practices.
CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment)
A multi-stakeholder coalition launched in 2022 to coordinate the reform of research assessment across institutions, funders and learned societies, primarily in Europe but with global membership.
DORA signatory
An individual or organisation that has formally endorsed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment by registering its commitment on the DORA website.
DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment)
A 2012 declaration urging that research assessment stop relying on journal-based metrics, particularly the Journal Impact Factor, as proxies for the quality of individual research outputs or researchers.
Benefit-sharing agreement
A formal arrangement specifying how the benefits arising from research, use of Traditional Knowledge, or use of biocultural resources are shared with the communities from which the knowledge or resources originate.
Community-controlled research
Research in which the community whose members, knowledge, lands, or resources are the focus exercises decisive authority over research questions, design, conduct, data governance, and dissemination.
Indigenous community review
A formal or community-designed review process through which an Indigenous community evaluates and decides upon proposed research, data use, or other activities that affect the community, its members, or its territories.
Cultural protocol
The established practices, norms, and expectations of an Indigenous community governing engagement with the community, its members, its knowledge, and its territories.
Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC)
The right of Indigenous Peoples to give or withhold consent to actions affecting them, their territories, or their resources, where consent is freely given, sought sufficiently in advance, and based on full and accessible information about the proposed activity.
Biocultural labels
Community-controlled metadata labels developed within the Local Contexts framework to communicate Indigenous Peoples' interests, provenance, and protocols associated with biocultural and genetic data and specimens.
Local Contexts (concept)
A framework and supporting infrastructure that enables Indigenous communities to manage and communicate their cultural and intellectual property and provenance through Traditional Knowledge Labels, Biocultural Labels, and institutional Notices.
Traditional Knowledge Labels
Community-controlled metadata labels that communicate Indigenous community protocols, permissions, and expectations attached to Traditional Knowledge and associated data, developed through the Local Contexts initiative.
Traditional Knowledge (TK)
Knowledge, know-how, skills, innovations, and practices developed, sustained, and passed on within Indigenous and local communities, often forming part of their cultural and spiritual identity.
Matauranga Maori
Maori knowledge: the body of knowledge, ways of knowing, and practices held by Maori communities, encompassing language, customs, environmental knowledge, history, and worldview.
Maiam nayri Wingara
An Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander data sovereignty collective in Australia, advocating for Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles in Australian data systems, research, and government.
Te Mana Raraunga
The Maori Data Sovereignty Network in Aotearoa New Zealand, advocating for Maori rights and interests in data and articulating principles of Maori Data Sovereignty grounded in Te Tiriti o Waitangi and tikanga.
OCAP Principles
The First Nations principles of Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession, asserting that First Nations have control over data collection processes and that they own and control how this information can be used, stewarded by FNIGC.
FNIGC (First Nations Information Governance Centre)
A First Nations-led non-profit organisation in Canada that asserts data sovereignty by promoting and supporting First Nations communities in stewarding information, and is the custodian and disseminator of the OCAP Principles.
Indigenous Data Governance
The principles, structures, mechanisms, and processes through which Indigenous Peoples exercise authority over the collection, access, use, and stewardship of data about themselves, their territories, resources, and ways of life.
GIDA (Global Indigenous Data Alliance)
An international network of Indigenous-led organisations and individuals advancing Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Indigenous Data Governance globally, and the source of the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.
Indigenous Data Sovereignty
The recognition of Indigenous Peoples' inherent and inalienable rights and interests relating to the collection, ownership, application, and stewardship of data about their peoples, lifeways, territories, and resources.
CARE Principles
A set of principles for Indigenous data governance articulated by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance in 2019, encompassing Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics, intended to complement the FAIR data principles with people- and purpose-oriented obligations.
Open vs closed research
The distinction between research conducted with the intent to disseminate findings broadly through publication and other open channels, and research subject to restrictions on dissemination, foreign-national access, or publication imposed by sponsor, classification, or contractual terms.
Five Eyes alliance (research context)
The intelligence-sharing partnership between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, increasingly invoked as a coordinating channel for aligned research security policies among the five countries.
JASON Report on research security
A 2019 report by the JASON advisory group, commissioned by the US National Science Foundation, analysing risks to fundamental research from foreign government influence and recommending a transparency-and-disclosure-based response rather than restrictive measures.
CHIPS and Science Act
A 2022 United States federal statute that authorises substantial public investment in semiconductor manufacturing and scientific research, and incorporates significant research security provisions affecting federally-funded researchers and institutions.
Trusted research framework (UK)
The United Kingdom guidance and supporting tools developed by the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (now NPSA) in collaboration with UKRI and university bodies, providing practical advice to researchers and institutions on managing risks of international research collaboration.
Joint appointment (foreign)
A formal appointment in which a researcher holds simultaneous positions at their primary institution and a foreign institution, each with defined roles, time commitments, and supervisory relationships.
Visiting scholar agreement
A written agreement between a host institution and a visiting researcher (and frequently their home institution) defining the terms, duration, access, intellectual property, and compliance expectations of the visit.
Deemed export
The release of controlled US technology or source code to a foreign national, even within the United States, that is treated under export control regulations as an export to the foreign national's country of nationality.
Fundamental research exemption
A provision in US export control regulations exempting basic and applied research, conducted at accredited institutions of higher education, the results of which are ordinarily published and shared broadly within the scientific community, from many export licensing requirements.
Export-controlled research
Research subject to government regulations restricting the transfer of certain items, software, technologies, or technical data to foreign persons, foreign destinations, or end uses, regardless of whether transfer occurs domestically or internationally.
Controlled unclassified information (CUI)
United States government information that requires safeguarding or dissemination controls pursuant to law, regulation, or government-wide policy, but is not classified under Executive Order 13526 or the Atomic Energy Act.
Sensitive technology
A technology area designated by national authorities as having potential national security, economic security, or strategic significance, warranting heightened due diligence and protective measures in research and innovation activities.
Undue foreign influence
The exertion of pressure, control, or hidden incentives by a foreign government or its proxies that distorts research conduct, integrity, or outputs to advance the interests of that foreign state at the expense of the funding country, host institution, or scientific community.
Foreign talent recruitment programme
A formal or informal arrangement sponsored, organised, or supported by a foreign state, instrumentality, or affiliated entity to recruit researchers based abroad, typically offering compensation, resources, or other benefits in exchange for affiliations, research outputs, or services.
In-kind contribution disclosure
The disclosure of non-monetary support provided in support of research, including access to laboratories, equipment, materials, personnel, data, or computational resources, regardless of whether a financial transaction occurs.
Pending grants disclosure
The disclosure of all research proposals submitted but not yet awarded or declined at the time of application, including those under review and those awaiting submission decision.
Active grants disclosure
The disclosure of all research grants currently providing financial or in-kind support to an investigator at the time of application or progress report.
Other support (NIH format)
The NIH-specific disclosure document listing all resources made available to a researcher in support of their research endeavours, including financial support and in-kind contributions, regardless of relevance to the NIH-funded project.
Current and pending support
A standardised disclosure of all current, pending, and in-kind sources of research support available to an investigator, regardless of monetary value, funding source, or relationship to the proposed work.
Foreign component disclosure
The disclosure of any significant scientific element or segment of a federally-funded research project performed outside the awardee country, including collaborators, resources, or activities conducted abroad.
Research security policy
An institutional or governmental policy framework that establishes safeguards, disclosures, and review processes intended to protect research integrity, intellectual property, sensitive data, and national interests from undue foreign influence or unauthorised transfer.
NSPM-33
United States National Security Presidential Memorandum 33, issued January 2021, directing federal research agencies to standardise disclosure requirements for researchers receiving federal funding and to strengthen protections against foreign government interference in the US research enterprise.
ICH GCP (Good Clinical Practice)
The International Council for Harmonisation E6 guideline establishing an international ethical and scientific quality standard for the design, conduct, recording, and reporting of clinical trials involving human participants, compliance with which provides public assurance that the rights, safety, and wellbeing of trial participants are protected and that trial data are credible.
Conflict of interest disclosure
The institutional process by which investigators report significant financial interests, fiduciary relationships, and other competing interests that could directly and significantly affect the design, conduct, or reporting of their research, enabling the institution to assess and manage, reduce, or eliminate identified conflicts.
Data processor
A natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body that processes personal data on behalf of the controller, as defined in Article 4(8) of the GDPR, only on documented instructions from the controller and bound by a written contract meeting Article 28 requirements.
Data controller
The natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body that, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data, as defined in Article 4(7) of the GDPR.
Privacy by design
The obligation under Article 25 of the GDPR for a controller to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures at the time of determination of the means of processing and at the time of processing itself in order to implement data-protection principles effectively and integrate the necessary safeguards into the processing.
Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)
A documented assessment required under Article 35 of the GDPR where a type of processing is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons, describing the processing, assessing necessity, proportionality, and risks, and identifying mitigating measures.
Right to erasure
The right under Article 17 of the GDPR for a data subject to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning them without undue delay where one of the grounds in Article 17(1) applies and no exception in Article 17(3) operates.
Data subject rights (GDPR)
The collective set of rights conferred on identifiable individuals by Chapter III of the GDPR (Articles 12-22), including the rights to be informed, of access, to rectification, to erasure, to restriction of processing, to data portability, to object, and not to be subject to solely automated decision-making with legal or similarly significant effects.
Withdrawal of consent
The exercise by a research participant of the right to revoke their consent to ongoing participation in research, after which the investigator must cease prospective collection of data or biospecimens from that participant and apply the protocol-specified handling of data already collected.
Dynamic consent
A consent model implemented via a secure digital platform that enables participants to grant, modify, or withdraw consent for specific research uses over time and to receive ongoing communication about studies that use their data or samples.
Broad consent
A regulatory consent option introduced by the 2018 revised Common Rule at §46.116(d) by which a subject consents prospectively to the storage, maintenance, and secondary research use of identifiable private information or identifiable biospecimens for future unspecified studies, subject to the elements enumerated in that paragraph.
Informed consent
The voluntary agreement of a prospective research participant, or their legally authorised representative, to take part in a specific research activity, given after disclosure of the information required by the applicable regulation and free from coercion or undue influence.
HIPAA Privacy Rule
The US federal regulation at 45 CFR Parts 160 and 164 Subparts A and E that establishes national standards for the protection of individually identifiable health information held or transmitted by covered entities and their business associates, requiring authorisation, a waiver, or another permitted basis for any use or disclosure for research.
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
The European Union regulation that governs the processing of personal data of individuals in the EU, requiring a lawful basis for processing, transparency to data subjects, data-minimisation, security, and accountability, with extraterritorial application where data subjects in the EU are targeted or monitored.
Confidentiality agreement (NDA)
A contract by which one or more parties agree to keep specified non-public information in confidence and to use it only for a defined purpose for a defined period, typically as a precursor to scientific discussions or contract negotiations.
Data Sharing Agreement (DSA)
A contract between two or more parties that governs the bidirectional or multilateral exchange of data, allocating responsibilities for data quality, security, lawful basis, sub-processor use, and any controller-to-controller or joint-controller obligations.
Data Use Agreement (DUA)
A contractual instrument required before a recipient may access an identifiable, restricted, or limited dataset that defines permitted uses, security obligations, re-disclosure prohibitions, destruction requirements, and breach-notification duties.
Material Transfer Agreement (MTA)
A bilateral contract governing the transfer of tangible research materials between two institutions that defines permitted uses, ownership of the original material and derivatives, publication rights, liability, and onward-transfer restrictions.
Common Rule (45 CFR 46)
The US federal policy for the protection of human subjects codified at 45 CFR Part 46 Subpart A and adopted by twenty federal departments and agencies, which applies to all non-exempt human-subjects research conducted or supported by those agencies.
IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee)
An institutionally appointed committee constituted under the US Animal Welfare Act regulations and the PHS Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals that reviews and approves all proposed activities involving vertebrate animals before such activities may begin.
REC (Research Ethics Committee)
A UK or EU committee constituted to provide an independent ethical opinion on a research proposal involving human participants, their tissue, or their identifiable data before the research may lawfully commence.
IRB (Institutional Review Board)
An institutionally designated committee constituted under 45 CFR 46.107 that reviews, approves, requires modification of, or disapproves research involving human subjects before any such research may be initiated at the institution.
Whistleblower (research)
A person who, in good faith, raises a concern about possible research misconduct, breach of research integrity, or other serious wrongdoing in a research context. The label applies when the concern is reported through a recognised channel and the reporter would benefit from protections against retaliation.
Expression of concern
A formal post-publication notice issued by a journal to alert readers to substantive concerns about a published article when the journal cannot yet conclude that retraction or correction is the appropriate outcome. An expression of concern is appropriate when concerns are credible but unresolved, often pending an institutional investigation.
Correction (corrigendum)
A formal post-publication notice that amends an error in a published article without invalidating its overall conclusions. A correction is appropriate when the error is bounded and the central findings remain reliable; a retraction is appropriate when the conclusions are unreliable.
Retraction
The formal withdrawal of a published article from the literature by the journal, with a public retraction notice explaining the reason. An article is retracted when the journal determines that its findings are unreliable due to misconduct, honest error, or other invalidating factors.
Hong Kong Principles (2020)
Five principles for assessing researchers, articulated by Moher and colleagues at the 6th World Conference on Research Integrity in Hong Kong (2019) and published in 2020, designed to incentivise responsible research practices through hiring, promotion, and funding decisions. An institution adheres to the principles if its assessment processes embody all five.
Singapore Statement on Research Integrity (2010)
A short framework statement of four principles and fourteen responsibilities for the responsible conduct of research, adopted at the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity in Singapore in 2010. It is referenced as a foundational global statement rather than a regulatory instrument.
ENRIO
The European Network of Research Integrity Offices, a network of national research-integrity bodies and offices across European countries that share practices, case experience, and policy positions. An organisation joins ENRIO by application from a national body with a research-integrity remit.
UKRIO
The UK Research Integrity Office, an independent advisory body providing confidential, expert advice on research integrity matters to UK research organisations and researchers. A query falls within UKRIO's remit if it concerns the conduct or governance of research in a UK context.
ORI (US Office of Research Integrity)
The US federal office within the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees and monitors investigations of research misconduct involving Public Health Service-funded research. A case is in ORI's jurisdiction if PHS funds (NIH, CDC, FDA, etc.) supported the research at issue.
COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)
An international membership organisation providing standards, guidance, and case-by-case advice on publication ethics to editors and publishers. A journal is a COPE member if it adheres to the COPE Core Practices and pays the membership fee.
Citation cartel
A group of authors, editors, or journals that systematically cite one another's work beyond what the science would warrant, in order to inflate citation-based metrics. A pattern is cartel-like when the citation flows between members are dramatically denser than flows to comparable non-members.
Tortured phrases
Unusual paraphrases of established technical terminology that result from automated synonym substitution, often used to evade plagiarism detection. A phrase is tortured when a domain reader recognises it as a mangled rendition of a standard term.
Paper mill
A commercial operation that produces fabricated or low-effort manuscripts and sells authorship slots, or that brokers acceptance of such manuscripts into journals. A submission originates from a paper mill if the underlying research was not conducted by the named authors or was fabricated to order.
Image duplication
The undisclosed reuse of an image, or portion of an image, to represent a different experimental condition, time point, or sample. Duplication is problematic when the figure legend implies the images are distinct sources.
Image manipulation
Adjustment of a research image (gel, blot, microscopy, etc.) in a way that misrepresents the underlying data or violates journal image-integrity policies. Manipulation is problematic when it changes the conclusion a reader would draw or when it would not survive disclosure.
Coercive citation
The practice by editors or reviewers of pressuring authors to add citations that are not scientifically warranted, typically to the journal or to the reviewer's own work, as a condition of acceptance. A request is coercive when no substantive scientific reason is given and the citations would not otherwise be added.
Gift authorship
The inclusion as an author of a person who did not meet the substantive authorship criteria, typically as a courtesy, in exchange for resources, or for prestige. An authorship is a gift when removing the named person would not require any change to the manuscript.
Ghost authorship
The undisclosed substantial contribution to a manuscript by a person not listed as an author or named in the acknowledgements. A contribution is ghost-written when, by ICMJE criteria, it would have warranted authorship had it been disclosed.
Authorship dispute
A disagreement between contributors over who should be listed as an author, in what order, or with what role designation. A dispute is formally recognised when raised through an institutional process or with the journal.
Salami slicing
The practice of dividing a single coherent body of research into the smallest publishable units to maximise paper count. Outputs are salami-sliced when separating them obscures rather than clarifies the research and when readers must reassemble multiple papers to understand the whole.
Duplicate publication
Publishing the same study, or substantially the same study, in more than one venue without cross-reference and editorial permission. Two articles are duplicates if they share the same hypothesis, sample, methods, and core results to a degree that a meta-analyst would not treat them as independent.
Self-plagiarism
Reusing substantial portions of one's own previously published work in a new publication without disclosure or appropriate citation. A reuse qualifies if a reader is led to believe the material is new when it is not.
Plagiarism
The appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit. A passage or idea counts as plagiarised if a reasonable reader would attribute it to the new author when the substance originated with someone else.
Falsification
Manipulating research materials, equipment, processes, or data such that the research record does not accurately represent the actual results. A modification qualifies if it is undisclosed and changes the conclusions a reader would draw.
Fabrication
Making up data or results and recording or reporting them as if real. A finding is fabricated if no underlying experiment, observation, or measurement actually produced it.
Research misconduct
Fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism (FFP) in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results. An act qualifies if it is a significant departure from accepted practices, committed intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly, and proven by a preponderance of evidence.
Research integrity
The adherence to professional values and practices (honesty, rigour, transparency, accountability, fairness) such that research can be trusted by other researchers and by society. A practice exhibits research integrity if it could be openly described to peers without embarrassment or sanction.
Synthetic benchmark
A benchmark whose evaluation items are wholly or partially generated by another model or procedural method, rather than collected from natural human-produced sources, used to probe specific capabilities or to scale evaluation cheaply.
RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)
A training methodology in which a language model is fine-tuned using a reward signal derived from human preferences over pairs (or larger sets) of candidate model outputs, typically by first training a reward model and then optimising the policy against it via PPO or a related algorithm.
Constitutional AI (concept)
A training methodology in which a model is trained to align its outputs with a written set of principles ('a constitution'), with the model itself used to critique and revise candidate responses against those principles in place of direct human feedback at scale.
Prompt injection
An attack on a language-model-based system in which adversarial instructions, embedded in untrusted input (a document, web page, tool output, image), cause the model to act in ways that diverge from its developer's or user's intent.
Jailbreak (LLM)
A prompt or interaction pattern that causes a language model to bypass its safety training and produce outputs the model was tuned to refuse, such as harmful instructions, restricted content, or violations of provider policy.
Red-teaming
The practice of deliberately adversarial testing of an AI system by skilled testers attempting to elicit failures, unsafe outputs, or policy violations, in order to discover weaknesses before deployment.
AI safety case
A structured, evidence-based argument that an AI system is acceptably safe to deploy in a defined context, modelled on safety cases from established engineering disciplines (nuclear, aviation, medical devices).
AI evaluation card
A structured documentation artefact specifically describing an evaluation of an AI system, separate from the model card, including the evaluation methodology, datasets, metrics, results, and known limitations of the evaluation itself.
Reproducible AI experiment
An AI experiment for which sufficient artefacts and metadata are released (data, code, seed, environment, hyperparameters, training procedure) that an independent investigator can re-run it and obtain numerically equivalent or statistically indistinguishable results.
Open-source model (criteria)
A model meeting the criteria articulated by the Open Source Initiative's Open Source AI Definition: open data information, open code, and open weights, with each released under terms compatible with the OSI's freedoms to use, study, modify, and share.
Open weights model
A model whose trained parameter values are publicly released and downloadable, typically under a named licence, distinct from but often described as 'open' even when training data and code are not released.
Model weight licence
The licence terms governing the use, modification, and redistribution of a model's trained weights, which may differ from the licence on the training code and the licence on the training data.
Model checkpoint
A saved snapshot of a model's parameters (and optionally optimiser state) at a specific point in training, identified by a step number or version tag and serialised to a file format such as safetensors or .pt.
Model evaluation suite
A defined collection of benchmarks, tasks, and metrics, with standardised prompting and decoding rules, used to characterise a model's capabilities and behaviour across a range of dimensions.
Model fine-tune lineage
The specific portion of model lineage that records the sequence of fine-tuning operations applied to a base model: dataset, method (SFT, DPO, RLHF, LoRA), hyperparameters, and resulting checkpoint identifier.
Model lineage
The chain of provenance for a model recording its base model, the fine-tuning datasets and procedures applied, and any further derivatives, such that any deployed model can be traced back to its constituent training operations.
Inference carbon footprint
The greenhouse-gas emissions associated with serving inference requests from a deployed model, typically expressed per-request (e.g., gCO2e per query) or in aggregate (kgCO2e per month).
Training carbon footprint
The total greenhouse-gas emissions, expressed in kilograms or tonnes of CO2-equivalent, attributable to training a machine-learning model, estimated from energy consumption and the carbon intensity of the electricity supply.
Compute (FLOPs estimate)
The total floating-point operations consumed by training a model, conventionally reported as a single number (e.g., 3.0 x 10^25 FLOPs) used as a regulatory and scientific proxy for training-run scale.
Training data composition
The mixture of data sources, by domain, language, modality, and provenance, used to train a model, including the proportions and any filtering or deduplication applied.
Parameter count
The total number of learnable scalar weights in a machine-learning model, conventionally reported as a count (e.g., 7B = 7 x 10^9 parameters) and disclosed as a basic model metadata field.
Mixture-of-experts (MoE)
A neural-network architecture in which a learned router directs each input (or token) to a small subset of specialist sub-networks ('experts'), so that the model has a large total parameter count but uses only a fraction per forward pass.
Frontier model
A foundation model whose capabilities meet or exceed the most advanced publicly known systems at the time of training, often defined operationally by training-compute thresholds or by performance on canonical benchmarks.
Foundation model
A large machine-learning model trained on broad data at scale and adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks through fine-tuning, prompting, or retrieval augmentation.
MMLU benchmark
The Massive Multitask Language Understanding benchmark, a 57-subject multiple-choice test covering elementary, high-school, college, and professional knowledge, designed to probe broad-coverage language-model knowledge.
HELM benchmark
The Holistic Evaluation of Language Models benchmark, a multi-metric framework evaluating language models across accuracy, calibration, robustness, fairness, bias, toxicity, and efficiency on a fixed set of scenarios.
BIG-bench
The Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, a community-contributed collection of more than 200 tasks designed to probe capabilities of large language models that may be missed by narrower benchmarks.
MLCommons benchmark
A benchmark published by the MLCommons consortium for measuring AI system performance under standardised workloads, datasets, and submission rules, with the principal suites being MLPerf Training, MLPerf Inference, and MLPerf HPC.
Hugging Face Hub (concept)
A web-based platform and ecosystem for sharing machine-learning models, datasets, and demonstration applications ('Spaces'), with conventions for model cards, dataset cards, and versioned repositories.
NIST AI RMF (Risk Management Framework)
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology's voluntary framework for managing risks associated with AI systems across the AI lifecycle, structured around the functions Govern, Map, Measure, and Manage.
ISO/IEC 42001 (AI management system)
An international standard, published in 2023, specifying requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving an AI Management System within an organisation, structured analogously to ISO 9001 (quality) and ISO/IEC 27001 (information security).
AI conformance assessment
A formal evaluation, conducted by the AI system provider or a notified third-party body, demonstrating that an AI system meets the applicable regulatory or standard-based requirements before being placed on the market.
AI assurance
The process of measuring, evaluating, and communicating the trustworthiness of AI systems through evidence-based mechanisms such as audits, certifications, impact assessments, and conformity declarations.
Trustworthy AI
AI systems exhibiting properties (lawful, ethical, technically robust) that warrant the trust of users, affected parties, and society, as articulated in the EU High-Level Expert Group's framework and adopted in subsequent regulation.
Responsible AI
An umbrella term covering the design, development, deployment, and governance practices intended to ensure AI systems are ethical, fair, transparent, accountable, robust, secure, and respectful of privacy.
Use card
A documentation artefact recording an intended deployment context for a model or system, including the user population, the decisions the model informs, the supervision regime, and out-of-scope uses.
Algorithm card
A documentation artefact describing the algorithmic method or family (e.g., a particular gradient-boosting estimator, a clustering algorithm) independent of any particular trained instance, including inductive biases, assumptions, complexity, and intended use cases.
Bias audit (model)
An audit specifically focused on disparate model performance across demographic, geographic, or contextual sub-groups, including testing for direct, proxy, and intersectional disparities.
Model audit
A structured assessment of a machine-learning model by an independent party against pre-specified criteria covering performance, robustness, fairness, security, privacy, and conformance with stated policy.
Data statement (NLP)
A standardised description of an NLP dataset covering curation rationale, language variety, speaker and annotator demographics, speech situation, text characteristics, and recording quality.
Datasheet for datasets
A structured document accompanying a machine-learning dataset that records its motivation, composition, collection process, pre-processing, intended uses, distribution, and maintenance, modelled on electronic-component datasheets.
System card
A documentation artefact describing an AI-enabled system in its production configuration, including the constituent models, the pre- and post-processing pipeline, safety filters, monitoring, and operational guardrails.
Model card
A short, structured document accompanying a machine-learning model that records its intended use, training data, evaluation methodology, performance characteristics across population sub-groups, and known limitations.
Scientific rigour
The strict application of the scientific method to ensure unbiased and well-controlled experimental design, methodology, analysis, interpretation, and reporting of results.
Authentication of key resources
The verification, by methods appropriate to the resource type, of the identity and integrity of biological and chemical materials used in research, including cell lines, antibodies, animal models, and specialty chemicals.
NIH Rigor and Reproducibility policy
The set of US National Institutes of Health policies, effective from 2016, requiring applicants and grantees to address scientific premise, scientific rigour, biological variables (including sex as a biological variable), and authentication of key biological and chemical resources in grant applications.
STROBE
The Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology guidelines, a 22-item checklist covering items that should be reported in cohort, case-control, and cross-sectional studies.
PRISMA 2020
The 2020 update of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses, a 27-item checklist with accompanying flow diagram for reporting systematic reviews.
CONSORT 2010
The 2010 edition of the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials, a 25-item checklist and participant-flow diagram covering items that should be reported in any randomised controlled trial publication.
ARRIVE 2.0
The 2020 revision of the Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments guidelines, a checklist of items that should be reported in any publication describing animal research, in order to enable assessment and replication.
TOP Guidelines
The Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines, an eight-standard framework for journal policies covering citation, data, materials, code, design, analysis, pre-registration, and replication.
Crowdsourced replication
A coordinated effort in which many independent laboratories or teams attempt to replicate the same set of studies under pre-specified protocols, in order to estimate field-wide replicability.
Many-analysts study
A study design in which a single dataset and research question are given to multiple independent analysts or teams who proceed without coordination, and the distribution of their conclusions is then compared.
Researcher degrees of freedom
The decisions an analyst makes during a study (inclusion criteria, outcome definition, model specification, covariate set) any of which, if made differently, would yield a different result.
Garden of forking paths
The Gelman-Loken metaphor for the implicit, data-dependent multiplicity of analytical choices made in the course of an empirical study, even by analysts not engaged in explicit p-hacking.
Forking paths
The phenomenon by which the cumulative effect of many small, data-contingent analytical choices inflates false-positive rates even when each individual choice appears defensible.
HARKing (Hypothesising After Results are Known)
Presenting a post-hoc hypothesis, formulated after data analysis, as if it had been the a priori hypothesis under test.
P-hacking
The practice of selectively reporting or adjusting analytical choices in order to obtain a statistically significant p-value, typically below the conventional 0.05 threshold.
Reproducibility audit
A systematic, post-publication examination of whether a study's published results can be obtained from its deposited data and code, typically performed by an independent analyst.
Code review (research software)
A structured review of research software by one or more peers, focused on correctness, clarity, documentation, testing, and fitness for purpose, conducted before publication or as part of community-curated software repositories.
Software citation (Software Citation Working Group)
The practice of citing research software in the reference list of a publication, with sufficient metadata (authors, title, version, persistent identifier, role) to credit creators and enable retrieval of the cited version.
FAIR4RS Software Citation Principles
An extension of the FAIR Guiding Principles to research software, articulating that software should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, with the precise interpretations adapted to software's distinctive properties (executability, versioning, dependencies).
Reproducible Research Practices (RRP)
The set of disciplinary norms, tools, and habits that together raise the probability that published research will be reproducible: literate programming, version control, dependency pinning, data deposit, code release, and reporting standards.
Nextflow (concept)
A workflow orchestration system based on dataflow programming with a Groovy-based domain-specific language, designed for scalable, container-native, multi-platform execution of computational pipelines.
Snakemake (concept)
A Python-based workflow management system that expresses computational pipelines as rules with explicit inputs, outputs, and shell or script bodies, and infers a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of jobs from those rules.
Container image (Docker/Singularity/Apptainer)
A packaged, immutable filesystem and configuration that contains an application together with all its dependencies, runnable identically on any compatible container engine (Docker, Podman, Singularity, Apptainer).
Workflow language (CWL/WDL)
A declarative specification language for describing multi-step computational analyses such that the steps, their inputs and outputs, and their software dependencies are portable across compatible workflow execution engines.
Computational environment
The full software and hardware context in which an analysis runs, including operating system, language runtime, library versions, configuration, environment variables, and hardware-specific dependencies (e.g., GPU drivers).
Code availability statement
A statement in a published article describing where the source code used in the study can be obtained, under what licence, and at what version, typically required by journal policy.
Data availability statement
A statement in a published article describing where the data underlying the study can be found, the conditions of access, and any restrictions, typically required by journal policy.
Open data
The practice of making research data freely available for any user to access, use, modify, and share, subject only to attribution requirements, typically through deposit in a public repository under an open licence.
Open materials
The release of the non-data, non-code materials used in a study (stimuli, survey instruments, experimental protocols, training materials, intervention manuals) such that future investigators can re-implement the procedure.
Open code
The practice of releasing the source code used in a study, under an open-source licence, alongside the publication, such that any reader may inspect, reuse, and re-execute the analysis.
Robustness check
An additional analysis, supplementary to the headline result, that varies one or more analytical choices in order to demonstrate that the main conclusion is not artefactual to those choices.
Multiverse analysis
An analytical approach in which all reasonable combinations of data-processing and modelling choices are executed, producing a distribution of results that displays the impact of researcher degrees of freedom on the conclusion.
Specification curve
An analytic and visual technique that plots the estimated effect across a large set of theoretically defensible model specifications, ordered by effect size, to convey the sensitivity of the result to analytical choices.
Pre-analysis plan
A detailed, time-stamped document specifying the statistical models, variable transformations, exclusion criteria, and inference rules to be applied to a dataset, lodged before the analyst sees the outcome data.
Pre-registration
The practice of publicly recording a study's hypotheses, design, sample, and analysis plan in a time-stamped registry before data collection or (in secondary-data work) before data access, in order to distinguish pre-specified from post-hoc analyses.
Reproducibility crisis
The widely reported finding that substantial proportions of published research, particularly in biomedical, psychological, and social sciences, fail to reproduce or replicate when re-tested.
Inferential reproducibility
The degree to which independent analysts reach the same qualitative scientific conclusion from the same data, even where their analytical choices differ.
Results reproducibility
The narrow sense in which a study's reported quantitative results can be recreated from the deposited data using the deposited analysis procedures.
Methods reproducibility
The degree to which a study's methods are reported in sufficient detail that another investigator could re-implement them, independent of whether the same numerical or empirical results would follow.
Empirical reproducibility
The ability to obtain consistent observations when an empirical procedure (laboratory, field, or measurement) is independently repeated under matched conditions.
Computational reproducibility
The narrow technical sense of reproducibility: obtaining the same numerical outputs from the same data and code, on a comparable computational environment.
Generalisability
The extent to which a study's findings extend to populations, settings, or conditions other than those directly sampled.
Robustness
The stability of a study's conclusions under reasonable variations in analytical choices, model specification, sample inclusion, or measurement, on the same data.
Replicability
The ability to obtain consistent results when an independent investigator collects new data using the same study design and analysis procedures.
Reproducibility
The ability to obtain consistent computational or analytical results when the same data and analysis procedures are applied by an independent investigator using the same code and tools.
Sensitive-data handling (in DMP)
The section of a DMP that documents the categories of sensitive data involved (personal, special category, commercially confidential, indigenous, security-restricted), the legal basis for processing, and the technical and organisational measures applied.
Sharing commitment (in DMP)
A statement in a DMP specifying which datasets will be shared, to whom, on what licence, with what timing relative to project end, and through which infrastructure.
Retention period (in DMP)
The minimum duration for which a specified dataset will be retained after project end, expressed as a calendar period and recorded as part of the DMP's preservation commitments.
Preservation commitment (in DMP)
A statement in a DMP specifying which datasets will be preserved beyond project end, in which repository, for how long, and under what conditions.
Cost element (in DMP)
A line item in a DMP describing a financial commitment associated with data management, such as repository deposit fees, long-term storage, data steward time, or anonymisation services.
Output management plan (OMP)
A broader successor concept to the DMP that covers all categories of research output (data, software, samples, protocols, models, publications) within a single management plan.
Software management plan (SMP)
A structured plan covering how research software will be developed, documented, licensed, tested, released, and maintained over a project's lifetime, increasingly required alongside or as an extension of a DMP.
Data steward role (in DMP)
A named individual or role accountable for the day-to-day execution of a DMP's commitments, typically distinct from the principal investigator and reported in the DMP's contributor metadata.
DMP component
A discrete, reusable section of a DMP corresponding to a logical entity (project, dataset, contributor, host, cost, security_and_privacy) as modelled in the RDA DMP Common Standard.
DMP compliance check
An automated or rules-based verification that a DMP satisfies the structural and policy requirements of a specific funder, institution, or standard, typically returning a binary or itemised pass/fail outcome.
DMP assessment
The structured rating of a DMP against a published rubric to produce a comparable score across plans, used in funder evaluation, institutional benchmarking, and capacity-building.
DMP review
A formal or informal evaluation of a DMP by a peer, data steward, librarian, or funder reviewer against quality criteria such as completeness, plausibility, and policy alignment.
Living DMP
A DMP that is versioned, citable, and intended to evolve over the life of the project, with each significant change captured as a new version of the plan.
Static DMP
A DMP that is produced at a single point in time (typically grant submission) and not subsequently updated, regardless of whether the project's data realities evolve.
Active DMP
A DMP that is actively maintained, updated, and queried during project execution, typically in machine-actionable form, in contrast to a one-off document filed at proposal stage.
DMP closeout phase
The final phase of the DMP lifecycle, at or after project end, when the plan is reconciled against actual outputs, preservation commitments are confirmed, and the DMP is archived as part of the project record.
DMP active phase
The phase of the DMP lifecycle during project execution, when the plan is iteratively updated as data are actually generated, processed, and deposited.
DMP creation phase
The phase of the DMP lifecycle covering initial drafting, typically at grant-proposal stage, when data types, volumes, and intended sharing arrangements are projected rather than known.
DMP lifecycle
The set of phases through which a Data Management Plan passes from initial drafting at proposal stage, through active project execution, to project closeout and post-project preservation.
DMP RDA-JSON-LD
A JSON-LD context and ontology rendering of the RDA DMP Common Standard, enabling DMP graphs to be expressed as linked data and merged with other research-information graphs.
ezDMP
A funder-focused DMP creation service that guides researchers through funder-specific (originally US NSF directorates') requirements and produces both narrative and structured outputs.
DataDMP
A DMP authoring and management platform developed in Germany that implements the RDA DMP Common Standard and emphasises integration with institutional research-data infrastructures.
Argos (OpenAIRE)
OpenAIRE's open-source DMP authoring service, designed from the outset around the RDA DMP Common Standard and integrated with European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and OpenAIRE Research Graph services.
DMPonline (DCC product)
The UK Digital Curation Centre's hosted instance of the DMPRoadmap platform, providing DMP authoring for UK and international institutions against funder-specific templates.
DMPRoadmap (DMP Tool)
An open-source Ruby on Rails platform for creating, reviewing, and exporting Data Management Plans, jointly developed by the UK Digital Curation Centre and the University of California Curation Center, and deployed under different brands (notably DMPonline and DMPTool).
DMP machine-readable expression
The structured serialisation of a DMP's content in a format (JSON, JSON-LD, XML) that conforming software can parse, validate, and act upon without human re-interpretation.
DMP narrative
The human-readable prose portion of a Data Management Plan, typically organised under the headings of the applicable funder or institutional template.
DMP template
A funder-, institution-, or community-specific structured set of questions and guidance used to elicit the content of a Data Management Plan from researchers.
RDA DMP Common Standard
A community-developed application profile, maintained by the Research Data Alliance DMP Common Standards Working Group, defining the core entities, properties, and JSON schema for expressing machine-actionable DMPs.
Machine-actionable DMP (maDMP)
A Data Management Plan expressed in a structured, machine-readable format (typically JSON conforming to the RDA DMP Common Standard) that enables automated exchange, validation, and updating between systems such as DMP tools, repositories, CRIS/RIMS, and funder portals.
Data Management Plan (DMP)
A formal document that describes how research data will be collected, processed, described, stored, shared, preserved, and (where appropriate) destroyed across the lifecycle of a research project.
Aggregator service
A service that harvests, harmonises, and re-exposes metadata and (sometimes) content from many upstream sources, providing a unified search, browse, or query interface across the aggregated corpus; canonical examples include OpenAIRE, BASE, CORE, and OpenAlex.
Data safe haven
A secure data-handling environment that allows controlled, audited access to sensitive datasets for approved research, applying technical, physical, and procedural safeguards; effectively a synonym for trusted research environment (TRE) in much current usage, though the term has older roots in NHS information governance.
Five Safes framework
A framework for the safe use of sensitive data in research, articulated by the UK Office for National Statistics, that organises controls under five dimensions: Safe People, Safe Projects, Safe Settings, Safe Data, and Safe Outputs.
Trusted research environment
A secure computing environment — typically delivered as a remote-access workspace with controlled inbound/outbound data flows — that allows accredited researchers to analyse sensitive data in situ without exporting the data, supporting privacy-preserving secondary research use.
Sensitive-data repository
A repository specifically designed to hold sensitive research data — typically personal data, health data, criminal-justice data, commercially-confidential data, or culturally-sensitive Indigenous data — with enhanced access controls, audit logging, contractual access conditions, and (often) a secure analysis environment.
Persistent data identifier
A persistent identifier (typically a DataCite DOI, but also IGSN for samples, Handle, ARK, or other PID-scheme identifier) assigned to a research dataset to support stable citation, attribution, and resolution over the long term.
Dataset landing page
The human-readable web page that a dataset's persistent identifier (typically a DataCite DOI) resolves to, presenting the dataset's title, creators, description, identifiers, dates, version history, related works, access conditions, and a link to download or request the data.
Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles
The 2014 statement produced by Force11's Data Citation Synthesis Group, signed by a wide community of publishers, funders, repositories, and infrastructure providers, that articulates eight principles for the citation of research data in scholarly communication.
Data citation principle
Any of the eight principles articulated in the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles (Force11, 2014) covering importance, credit and attribution, evidence, unique identification, access, persistence, specificity and verifiability, and interoperability and flexibility of data citations in scholarly communication.
Data publication platform
A platform that supports the publication of research data as a citable artefact — assigning a persistent identifier, presenting a landing page, and applying review, curation, or peer-review processes — distinct from purely depositional storage.
Domain repository
Synonym for discipline-specific repository: a repository whose scope is a particular research domain (or domain-sub-area), with curation practices and metadata tailored to that domain.
Generalist repository
A repository that accepts research outputs from any discipline, applying domain-agnostic curation and discovery, and serving as a deposit destination for outputs that have no natural discipline-specific home or whose authors prefer a single multidisciplinary venue.
Discipline-specific repository
A repository whose scope is bounded to a particular research discipline or sub-discipline, with curation practices, metadata schemas, and community standards tailored to that domain's data types, terminologies, and norms.
FAIRsharing (concept)
A curated, community-driven registry of databases, standards (metadata, identifiers, formats, terminologies), and data policies relevant to research data, maintained at the University of Oxford with linkage to funders, journals, and standards organisations.
Re3data (concept)
Registry of Research Data Repositories: a global registry, operated by DataCite and partner institutions, that lists research data repositories worldwide with descriptive metadata about their disciplines, content types, access conditions, and policies, helping researchers locate suitable repositories for deposit and discovery.
UK Data Service (concept)
A UK ESRC-funded data infrastructure that holds, curates, and provides access to social, economic, and population data resources for research, learning, and policy, comprising the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex and partner institutions.
ICPSR (concept)
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research: a consortium-membership-funded data archive based at the University of Michigan that holds and curates over 10,000 social-science research datasets, providing access to member institutions worldwide.
Harvard Dataverse (concept)
A free research-data repository operated by Harvard University on the open-source Dataverse software platform, accepting datasets from researchers worldwide, minting DataCite DOIs, and serving as the flagship instance of the global Dataverse network.
Dryad (concept)
A non-profit generalist research data repository operated by Dryad Data Inc. (in partnership with the California Digital Library) that publishes peer-reviewed-paper-linked datasets, mints DataCite DOIs, and applies curation review before publication.
Figshare (concept)
A commercial generalist research repository operated by Digital Science that accepts datasets, figures, presentations, papers, software, and other research artefacts, minting DataCite DOIs and offering institutional-branded instances ('Figshare for Institutions') alongside the public service.
Zenodo (concept)
A free generalist research repository operated by CERN and developed under OpenAIRE that accepts deposits of datasets, software, publications, presentations, posters, and other research artefacts, minting DataCite DOIs and providing free preservation up to a per-record size limit.
GitHub mirror
A copy of a Git repository (or set of repositories) hosted on GitHub that tracks an upstream source repository elsewhere, typically maintained for redundancy, visibility, or community-engagement reasons rather than as the canonical primary copy.
Software Heritage archive
A non-profit international initiative based at Inria that systematically crawls, archives, and preserves the world's publicly available source code, including its full version-control history, and issues persistent identifiers (Software Hash Identifiers, SWHIDs) to every archived artefact.
Code repository
A version-controlled storage location for source code, typically operated on top of a distributed version-control system such as Git, exposing the code's full revision history, branches, tags, and (often) collaboration features such as issues, pull requests, and code review.
Tissue bank
A specific kind of biobank focused on the collection, processing, storage, and distribution of human tissue samples (typically solid tissue specimens from surgical or post-mortem sources), governed under tissue-banking regulation in the relevant jurisdiction.
Sample repository
A repository for physical research samples — geological, environmental, biological, or material — that catalogues, stores, and provides access to samples for downstream analysis, often issuing persistent identifiers (IGSN, DataCite DOI) for citation and provenance tracking.
Biorepository
A facility or organisation that collects, processes, stores, and distributes biological materials and their associated data for research, encompassing both human and non-human samples, distinguished from a 'biobank' by usage in some communities to denote broader scope or specific research projects.
Biobank
An organised collection of biological samples (typically human samples such as blood, tissue, DNA, urine) together with their associated clinical, demographic, and lifestyle data, governed for use in biomedical research.
National data infrastructure
A coordinated, nationally-scoped programme and set of services for the storage, sharing, and reuse of research data within a country, typically combining funding policy, technical infrastructure (repositories, compute, federation), training, and governance.
Data hub
A central node in a data ecosystem that aggregates, harmonises, and brokers access to data from multiple upstream sources, exposing the harmonised data to downstream consumers via curated APIs, query interfaces, or download endpoints.
Federated data infrastructure
A data infrastructure in which data, services, and access controls remain distributed across multiple independent nodes (typically operated by different organisations) but are made discoverable, queryable, and usable as a unified resource through shared protocols, vocabularies, and identity-federation.
Data warehouse
A central repository of structured data, integrated from multiple operational sources, modelled for analytical querying (typically with a star or snowflake schema), and optimised for read-heavy workloads supporting reporting and decision-making.
Data lake
A storage repository that holds large volumes of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data in their native formats, deferring schema-on-write requirements so that data can be ingested cheaply and only structured at the time of read or analysis.
Data commons
A shared data resource — often combined with shared computing and analysis tools — governed by a community under defined access and contribution rules, designed to enable many users to use and add to the resource for collective benefit.
Data trust
A legal and organisational structure in which a fiduciary intermediary holds, governs, and brokers access to a body of data on behalf of its contributors and beneficiaries, applying agreed terms of access, use, and accountability.
World Data System certification
Historic certification programme of ICSU's World Data System (WDS) under which scientific data centres in geosciences and related fields were certified as trustworthy; merged with the Data Seal of Approval in 2017 to form CoreTrustSeal.
CoreTrustSeal
A community-based, non-profit certification scheme for trustworthy data repositories, operated by the CoreTrustSeal Foundation, awarded against 16 published requirements covering organisational infrastructure, digital object management, and technical infrastructure.
Trusted digital repository
A digital repository whose mission, governance, technical infrastructure, and procedures have been independently assessed against a recognised standard (e.g. CoreTrustSeal, nestor seal, ISO 16363) and judged trustworthy to preserve digital content over the long term.
EOSC Federation
The architectural model adopted by EOSC for federating heterogeneous national, thematic, and pan-European research-data infrastructures into a single user-facing layer, with shared identity and access management, monitoring, accounting, helpdesk, and service onboarding.
EOSC Marketplace
The catalogue of FAIR research services accessible to European researchers through the European Open Science Cloud, where service providers register their offerings and researchers can discover, order, and (where applicable) access services with EOSC-federated authentication.
Crossref deposit XML
The XML schema family maintained by Crossref that publishers and content-registration members use to submit metadata when minting Crossref DOIs, with distinct sub-schemas for journals, books, conference proceedings, preprints, peer reviews, grants, and standards.
DataCite metadata schema
The XML/JSON schema (current version 4.x) maintained by the DataCite Metadata Working Group that defines the mandatory, recommended, and optional metadata properties to be supplied when registering a DOI through DataCite.
RIOXX
Research Outputs Information Exchange XML (RIOXX): a UK-originated application profile for institutional-repository metadata, layered on Dublin Core, designed to capture funder, project, and licence information for OA-compliance reporting, currently maintained at v3.0.
MODS
Metadata Object Description Schema: a Library of Congress XML schema for descriptive bibliographic metadata, designed as a richer alternative to Dublin Core and a more flexible alternative to MARC for library, archive, and repository contexts.
METS
Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard: a Library of Congress-maintained XML schema for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata for digital library objects, providing a wrapper around content files and metadata sections.
RDF triple store
A database management system specialised for storing and querying RDF (Resource Description Framework) statements — subject-predicate-object triples (or named-graph quads) — typically with a SPARQL query engine on top.
SPARQL endpoint
An HTTP endpoint that accepts SPARQL queries (the W3C-standard query language for RDF) against an RDF dataset and returns results in standard formats (XML, JSON, CSV, TSV), implementing the SPARQL 1.1 Protocol.
Linked Data Fragments
A family of Web interfaces for publishing RDF data — ranging from data dumps through SPARQL endpoints to lightweight Triple Pattern Fragments — designed to allow clients to query large RDF datasets without overloading the server.
ResourceSync
ANSI/NISO Z39.99: a framework for synchronising resources between a source server and one or more destination servers using Web-based sitemaps with extensions for change lists, incremental updates, and push notifications.
OAI-ORE
Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange: a set of specifications, complementary to OAI-PMH, that define how to describe and exchange aggregations of Web resources (a 'compound digital object') using standard Web Architecture and Linked Data principles.
JATS XML
Journal Article Tag Suite (ANSI/NISO Z39.96): an XML vocabulary for describing the textual content and metadata of scholarly journal articles, comprising tag sets for archival (Green), publishing (Blue), and authoring (Pumpkin) use cases.
OAI-PMH
Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting: a low-barrier HTTP/XML protocol that allows a 'data provider' system (typically a repository or CRIS) to expose its metadata records for incremental harvesting by 'service providers' (aggregators, search services, national portals).
CRIS interoperability
The capacity of CRIS systems to exchange data with each other and with adjacent systems (repositories, funders, publishers, aggregators) through shared data models, schemas, protocols, and persistent identifiers — most prominently CERIF, OAI-PMH, OpenAIRE Guidelines, and PID-based joins.
Affiliation (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, a time-bounded relationship between a Person record and an Organization Unit, capturing the role (employee, visitor, honorary, student), start and end dates, employment fraction, and other contextual attributes of the association.
Organization unit
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a structural component of a research organisation — a faculty, school, department, institute, centre, lab, or research group — with its own identifier, name, parent and child relationships, type, start and end dates, and links to People, Projects, and Outputs.
Person record (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, the entity representing an individual person involved in research — researcher, RA, PhD candidate, or other contributor — with metadata including names (preferred and historical), identifiers (ORCID iD, ISNI, local HR ID), employments, qualifications, and links to outputs, projects, and organisational units.
Project (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a discrete research project with a defined scope, time period, participating people and organisations, funding source(s), and intended or actual outputs — typically the central organising entity for activity-level reporting.
Funding entity
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a specific award or funding instance — its funder, award number, amount, currency, start and end dates, and the project and people it supports — distinct from the abstract Funder organisation and from the project itself.
Research output (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a discrete product of research — a publication, dataset, software release, patent, performance, exhibition, or other recognised output — recorded with its own identifier, type, date, contributors, and relationships to people, organisations, and projects.
Research activity (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a research undertaking — typically a project, programme, or organised research effort — with its own start and end dates, participants, funding sources, outputs, and host organisation, around which CRIS data accretes over the activity's lifetime.
Research entity (CRIS)
A first-class object in a CRIS data model — typically Person, Project, Publication, Organisation Unit, Funding, Equipment, or Activity — that has its own identifier, metadata schema, and relationships to other entities, and that can be managed and reported on independently.
EOSC
European Open Science Cloud: an EU-led initiative and emerging federation of research data infrastructures intended to provide European researchers with seamless, cross-border, cross-discipline access to data, services, and computational resources under FAIR and open-science principles.
OpenAIRE Nexus
An OpenAIRE-led Horizon-Europe-funded initiative (2021-2024) that bundles OpenAIRE services and tools into a coherent service portfolio for delivery through the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), targeting researchers, content providers, research communities, funders, and policy makers.
OpenAIRE EXPLORE
The end-user-facing discovery service of OpenAIRE that allows researchers, funders, and the public to search and browse the OpenAIRE Graph by publications, datasets, software, projects, organisations, and funders.
OpenAIRE Graph
An open scholarly knowledge graph maintained by OpenAIRE that aggregates and links publications, datasets, software, projects, organisations, and people harvested from thousands of repositories, journals, and CRIS systems across Europe and globally, with deduplication, enrichment, and link inference applied.
DSpace-CRIS
An open-source extension of the DSpace repository platform, developed by 4Science and the DSpace community, that adds CRIS-style entity management for researchers, projects, organisational units, journals, and other research-information entities alongside the existing repository content.
VIVO
An open-source semantic-web application and ontology developed by the VIVO community (initially at Cornell University, now under DuraSpace/LYRASIS) that publishes information about researchers, departments, publications, grants, and courses as linked open data and as a navigable web interface.
Elements (Symplectic)
A commercial CRIS product developed by Symplectic (part of Digital Science) that automates the discovery, capture, and management of research outputs and activities for individual researchers and institutional reporting workflows, with strong emphasis on researcher-facing workflows.
Pure
A commercial CRIS product, originally developed by Atira A/S in Denmark and now owned by Elsevier, used by universities and research organisations to manage publications, projects, people, organisational units, awards, equipment, and external engagement, and to expose this information through a configurable public 'research portal'.
CERIF
Common European Research Information Format: an EU-recommended data model and exchange schema for research information, developed and maintained by euroCRIS, that defines core entities (Person, Project, Publication, OrgUnit, Funding, Equipment) and the relationships among them with explicit role-and-time semantics.
RIM
Research Information Management: the organisational practice and the supporting systems and processes by which a university or research organisation collects, manages, and uses information about its research activities, encompassing both the technical CRIS layer and the people and policies around it.
CRIS
Current Research Information System: an enterprise-class software system that aggregates, stores, and publishes information about a research organisation's activities — its researchers, publications, projects, funding, equipment, collaborations, and outputs — and exposes that information to internal management and external reporting consumers.
Identifier crosswalk
A mapping or correspondence table between identifiers in different schemes that refer to the same real-world entity, allowing a system holding one scheme's identifier to find the equivalent identifier in another scheme.
DOI tombstone
A tombstone page served at the resolved URL of a DOI after the underlying resource has been withdrawn, providing withdrawal information and metadata while ensuring the DOI itself continues to resolve.
DOI suffix
The portion of a DOI after the first forward slash, assigned by the registrant within their issued DOI prefix, identifying the specific object; can contain any Unicode characters with the case-insensitivity rule applied during comparison.
DOI prefix
The leading portion of a DOI before the first forward slash, of the form 10.NNNN where 10 is the directory indicator for DOI under the Handle System and NNNN is a numeric (or alphanumeric) string assigned by the DOI Registration Agency to a specific registrant.
Tombstone page
A landing page served at a persistent identifier's resolved URL after the underlying resource has been withdrawn, retracted, or made permanently unavailable, providing metadata describing the former resource, the reason for its absence, and (where applicable) a successor identifier.
Identifier syntax
The formal grammar that constrains the textual form of identifiers in a given scheme — what character sets, lengths, prefixes, separators, and check digits are allowed — typically expressed as a regular expression or BNF grammar in the scheme's specification.
Identifier scheme
A named, formally-defined system for constructing, issuing, and resolving identifiers, typically defined by a syntax, an authority structure (who can mint), a metadata schema, and a resolution policy.
PID resolution
The process by which a persistent identifier is looked up through its scheme's resolution infrastructure and returned either as an HTTP redirect to the current resource location or as metadata about the resource, depending on the request and the scheme's policy.
PID minting
The act of generating a new persistent identifier in a registered scheme and registering it, with associated metadata, at the appropriate PID provider so that it becomes resolvable and discoverable.
PID metadata
The descriptive metadata registered with a PID provider at the time of identifier minting, and updated thereafter, that describes the identified entity — its title, creators, dates, types, related identifiers, and so on — and that is exposed by the provider's APIs alongside the identifier itself.
Funder ID
An identifier from the Crossref Funder Registry (formerly FundRef), a curated, open registry of funder names and identifiers used by publishers to tag deposited works with the funders that supported them.
Curated org record (ROR)
An entry in the ROR registry that has been reviewed and approved by ROR curators against the published inclusion criteria, carrying a stable ROR ID and metadata including names, types, country, geographic location, parent/child/related/successor/predecessor relationships, and crosswalks.
ROR Curation
The community-driven process by which the Research Organization Registry receives, reviews, and acts on requests to add new organisations, update existing records, merge duplicates, or split records, governed by a published curation policy and managed by ROR's curation team.
PID graph
A graph data structure in which persistent identifiers (ORCID iDs, DOIs, ROR IDs, RAiDs, IGSNs, etc.) are nodes and the metadata relationships among them (creator-of, affiliated-with, funded-by, derived-from) are edges, allowing federated queries across multiple PID-provider registries.
PID consortium
A grouping of PID-provider member organisations, typically at national or regional scale, formed to share infrastructure, contracts, and support around one or more persistent identifier schemes such as DOI, ORCID, or ROR.
PID provider
An organisation that issues persistent identifiers from one or more PID schemes, operates (or contracts) the resolution infrastructure for those identifiers, and makes long-term commitments about the maintenance of the identifiers and their metadata.
Resolution service
A networked service that, given a persistent identifier, returns the current location of the named resource (typically by HTTP redirect) or returns its metadata, allowing the identifier itself to remain stable while the resource's location changes.
Persistent URL
An HTTP(S) URL that an issuing organisation commits to maintain unchanged over time so that links continue to resolve correctly even as the underlying resource is moved, renamed, or migrated between systems.
w3id.org PURL
A persistent URL hosted on the w3id.org domain by the W3C Permanent Identifier Community Group, providing a community-maintained redirect under https://w3id.org/<namespace> to ontologies, vocabularies, and standards documents that may move between hosting providers over time.
PURL
Persistent Uniform Resource Locator, a URL maintained by a PURL service that redirects (typically via HTTP 302) to the current location of the named resource, allowing the persistent URL to remain stable as the underlying resource location changes.
URN
Uniform Resource Name (RFC 8141), a URI of the form urn:NID:NSS where NID is a registered Namespace Identifier and NSS is the namespace-specific string, intended to denote a resource persistently and independently of any particular resolution mechanism.
Handle
An identifier in the CNRI Handle System (RFC 3650-3652), of the form Prefix/Suffix (e.g. 20.500.12345/abcd), resolved by a distributed system of Handle servers that map the identifier to one or more current URLs or other typed data values.
ARK inflection rules
A convention of the ARK identifier scheme whereby appending a single '?' to an ARK URL yields the object's descriptive metadata and appending '??' yields a 'commitment statement' describing the issuing institution's persistence policy for that ARK.
ARK
Archival Resource Key, a persistent identifier scheme for information objects of any type, in the form ark:/NAAN/Name[Qualifier], where NAAN is a Name Assigning Authority Number and Name is the local identifier; resolvable through any cooperating ARK resolver.
UUID
Universally Unique Identifier (RFC 4122 / ISO/IEC 9834-8), a 128-bit value rendered as 32 hexadecimal digits in 8-4-4-4-12 grouping, generated such that the probability of collision across independent generators is negligible.
GUID
Globally Unique Identifier, a generic term for an identifier that is intended to be unique across all systems and time, most commonly implemented as a 128-bit UUID but used informally for any opaque, globally scoped identifier.
PIDINST
A persistent identifier for a research instrument, minted under a DataCite DOI or Handle, conforming to the PIDINST metadata schema developed by an RDA Working Group, that enables citation of and provenance back to the instrument that produced data.
IGSN
International Geo Sample Number, a globally unique persistent identifier for physical samples (geological, environmental, biological) that supports tracking and citation of the sample through subsequent analyses, publications, and derived data.
RAiD
Research Activity Identifier, an ISO-standardised persistent identifier (ISO 23527) for a research project or activity, providing a stable handle around which related people, organisations, outputs, instruments, and funding can be linked over the activity's lifetime.
DataCite consortium
A national or regional grouping of DataCite member organisations led by a 'Consortium Lead' that holds the master agreement with DataCite, allowing member institutions to mint DOIs under a shared fee structure and shared support model.
DataCite DOI
A DOI registered through DataCite, the DOI Registration Agency that serves research data, software, samples, dissertations, instruments, and other non-article research outputs, accompanied by metadata in the DataCite Metadata Schema.
Crossref DOI
A DOI registered through Crossref, the DOI Registration Agency for scholarly publications (journals, books, conference proceedings, preprints, peer reviews, grants), accompanied by metadata deposited in Crossref's XML schema.
DOI
Digital Object Identifier (ISO 26324), a persistent identifier for an entity (typically a research output) consisting of a prefix assigned to a registrant by a DOI Registration Agency and a suffix assigned by the registrant, resolvable as an HTTPS URI under https://doi.org/.
ISNI
International Standard Name Identifier (ISO 27729), a 16-digit identifier for the public identity of a person or organisation involved in the creation, production, management, or distribution of content, administered by the ISNI International Agency.
GRID
Global Research Identifier Database, a legacy identifier and registry of research organisations originally operated by Digital Science, frozen to new records in 2021 and superseded by ROR, which seeded its registry from a deduplicated GRID snapshot.
ROR ID
A persistent identifier for research organisations issued by the Research Organization Registry (ROR), expressed as an HTTPS URI of the form https://ror.org/0xxxxxxxx where the final nine-character path component is a base32-encoded random value with a check digit.
ORCID education
An affiliation item in an ORCID record asserting that the iD holder studied at a named organisation, including degree or qualification, department, start and end dates, and the organisation's disambiguated identifier.
ORCID employment
An affiliation item in an ORCID record asserting that the iD holder is or was employed by a named organisation, with start date, optional end date, department, role title, and the organisation's disambiguated identifier (typically a ROR ID).
ORCID work assertion
A claim, recorded in an ORCID record, that a particular research output (journal article, book chapter, dataset, software, etc.) is associated with the iD holder, with metadata fields including title, type, publication year, external identifiers (DOI, ISBN, PMID), and contributor role.
ORCID record permissions
The three-level visibility setting attached to each item in an ORCID record — public, trusted parties only (limited), or private — which the record holder applies individually to names, employments, works, fundings, and other assertions.
ORCID consortium
A national or regional grouping of ORCID member organisations that share a single membership fee structure and a lead organisation, in order to coordinate ORCID adoption, training, and policy advocacy within a country or region.
ORCID API
The two-tier REST application programming interface (Public API and Member API) operated by ORCID that allows systems to read public ORCID record data and, with researcher authorisation, to read restricted data or write trusted-party assertions to records.
ORCID record
The structured profile maintained at orcid.org for an individual ORCID iD, containing assertions about the person's names, employments, educations, funding, works, peer reviews, and service activities, each with a visibility setting and a source attribution.
ORCID iD
A 16-digit persistent identifier, expressed as four hyphen-separated blocks (e.g. 0000-0002-1825-0097) and resolvable as an HTTPS URI under https://orcid.org/, that uniquely identifies an individual researcher across publications, datasets, grants, employments, and peer-review activity.
Container image (as output)
A reproducibility-supporting container image (Docker, Singularity/Apptainer, OCI) packaging a complete computational environment — operating system, dependencies, software, configuration — deposited in a container registry with a persistent identifier and treated as a citable research output.
Workflow (as output)
A computational workflow — a structured description of a multi-step analysis pipeline, expressed in a workflow language (Nextflow, Snakemake, CWL, WDL) or platform-specific format, with dependencies, parameters, and provenance — deposited in a repository with a persistent identifier as a citable research output.
Model (as output)
A trained machine-learning model — including its weights, architecture, training metadata, and accompanying model card — deposited in a model repository (Hugging Face, Zenodo) with a persistent identifier, treated as a citable scholarly output independent of any paper that may describe it.
Dataset (as output)
A research dataset deposited in a FAIR-aligned repository with a persistent identifier (typically a DataCite DOI), metadata, licence, and access conditions, treated as a citable scholarly output in its own right rather than only as supporting material for a paper.
Translation (work)
A scholarly publication that renders a previously-published work from one natural language into another, with the translator(s) credited and the original work referenced, treated as a distinct research output for purposes of credit, citation, and intellectual contribution.
White paper
An authoritative document — published by a government, industry, or research organisation — that provides analysis and recommendations on a specific issue, typically intended to inform policy, position the issuing body, or guide implementation, with a more formal and longer treatment than a policy brief.
Technical report
A scholarly document published by a research-performing organisation (laboratory, government agency, company) reporting technical work in detail, typically not peer-reviewed in the journal sense but vetted internally, and bearing an institutional report number for citation.
Policy brief
A short document — typically 2-8 pages — synthesising research evidence for a policy-maker audience, with explicit policy implications or recommendations, structured for accessibility rather than for academic readers, and issued by research institutions, NGOs, or government-aligned bodies.
Discussion paper
A scholarly document — published by institutions, learned societies, think-tanks, or government bodies — that presents an argued perspective, policy proposal, or position for community deliberation, sometimes formally inviting structured response.
Working paper
A scholarly document circulated through institutional working-paper series (e.g., NBER, IZA, CEPR), academic websites, or repositories, presenting research in progress for community feedback prior to (or sometimes instead of) formal peer review and journal publication.
Conference abstract
A short summary of research findings or planned work submitted to a conference for selection of oral or poster presentation, published in a conference abstract book or supplement, citable as a publication but typically lacking full peer review of the underlying research.
Conference proceeding
A peer-reviewed scholarly publication appearing in the published proceedings of a conference, workshop, or symposium, typically representing original research presented at the meeting, with a citation that includes the conference name, date, and proceedings location.
Null result publication
A peer-reviewed publication reporting that a study's primary analysis returned results statistically consistent with no effect (or, in equivalence/non-inferiority designs, consistent with no clinically meaningful difference), explicitly framed and interpreted as informative about the absence of effect.
Negative result paper
A peer-reviewed publication whose primary finding is that a tested hypothesis was not supported, an intervention did not produce the predicted effect, or an expected relationship was not observed, framed as a contribution to evidence rather than as a failure.
Lab notebook (electronic)
A digital record of laboratory experiments, observations, protocols, and analyses maintained in an electronic lab notebook (ELN) system, providing tamper-evident timestamping, attribution, and increasingly serving as a citable research output via DOI assignment of selected entries.
Living systematic review
A systematic review that is continuously updated — typically by re-running the registered search, screening newly-identified studies, and incorporating eligible ones into the synthesis — with explicit triggers for major versus minor updates and a publicly maintained version history.
Living review
A review article — systematic or otherwise — that is continuously or periodically updated as new evidence emerges, maintained as a single citable resource with version history rather than being supplanted by a fresh standalone review on each update.
Narrative review
A literature review that synthesises existing scholarship on a topic through expert judgement and discursive argument, without using the pre-specified protocols, reproducible search strategies, or quality-appraisal frameworks that characterise systematic and scoping reviews.
Meta-analysis
A quantitative synthesis of effect estimates from multiple studies on a common question, using statistical methods (typically random-effects models) to compute a pooled estimate with confidence interval and heterogeneity diagnostics.
Scoping review
A literature review that maps the breadth and nature of evidence on a broad topic — characterising what exists, where, and in what form — using systematic search methods but without typically appraising study quality or synthesising effect estimates, following PRISMA-ScR.
Systematic review
A literature review that follows a pre-specified, registered protocol to systematically identify, appraise, and synthesise all evidence relevant to a focused research question, using reproducible methods for searching, screening, data extraction, and quality assessment.
Case report
A peer-reviewed publication describing in detail one or a small number of individual cases — typically clinical, sometimes legal or social — for educational, hypothesis-generating, or rare-presentation-documenting purposes, structured according to discipline-specific reporting standards (e.g., CARE guidelines for clinical cases).
Brief report
A peer-reviewed publication format for compact original research findings, particularly in clinical and applied fields, with tight word and figure limits, used for results that warrant rapid or focused communication of a single result or small study.
Short communication
A peer-reviewed publication format for compact original research findings, typically with word limits below those of full original articles (2,000-3,000 words) but greater than letters or research letters, used for results meriting publication but not requiring full-article treatment.
Research letter
A short peer-reviewed publication presenting original research findings in a compressed format (typically under 1,000 words, limited tables/figures, abbreviated methods), used by journals for results that warrant rapid or concise communication.
Letter to editor
A short scholarly communication submitted to a journal in response to a previously-published article in that journal, raising questions, corrections, alternative interpretations, or additional evidence, typically published with a reply from the original authors.
Commentary
A short scholarly publication that responds to, contextualises, or critiques other recently-published work or a current development in the field, presenting an argued perspective rather than original empirical findings.
Methods paper
A peer-reviewed publication whose primary subject is a research methodology — a new analytic technique, experimental procedure, instrumentation approach, or computational method — described in sufficient detail for independent reuse, sometimes with worked examples.
Protocol paper
A peer-reviewed publication that fully describes the methodology of a planned or ongoing research study (clinical trial, systematic review, cohort study, laboratory protocol) prior to or alongside execution, sufficient to enable replication and to fix the methods against post-hoc revision.
Software paper
A peer-reviewed scholarly publication whose primary subject is a research software package — describing its functionality, architecture, dependencies, testing, and intended uses — published in a venue that issues this format (JOSS, SoftwareX), accompanying the software release in a citable repository.
Data paper
A peer-reviewed scholarly publication whose primary subject is a dataset — describing its collection, structure, processing, quality, and intended uses — published in a journal that specifically issues this format, accompanying the dataset itself in a FAIR-aligned repository.
Replication study
A study whose primary purpose is to re-test a specific claim from a previously-published study, using methods and analyses designed to closely match the original (direct replication) or to test the same hypothesis with deliberately different operationalisations (conceptual replication).
Stage-2 results paper
The completed registered report submitted after data collection, containing the results, discussion, and any exploratory (clearly labelled) analyses beyond the pre-registered plan, peer-reviewed only for adherence to the Stage 1 protocol and quality of conclusions — not for the direction of findings.
Stage-1 protocol
The introduction, methods, and analysis plan submitted as the first of two stages of a registered report, peer-reviewed for theoretical motivation, design adequacy, and analytic appropriateness, and (if accepted) granted in-principle acceptance for publication.
Registered report
A publication format in which a study's introduction, methods, and analysis plan are peer-reviewed and granted in-principle acceptance (IPA) before data collection or analysis, with the completed paper published regardless of the direction of the results provided the pre-registered methods were followed.
Version of record (VoR)
The final, formally published version of a scholarly work as issued by the publisher — including typesetting, pagination, copy-editing, and an assigned bibliographic citation — which is the canonical citable form of the work absent subsequent corrections.
Postprint
The author-accepted version of a manuscript after peer review and editorial decision of acceptance but before publisher typesetting and final layout — synonymous with 'author-accepted manuscript' (AAM) in many usage contexts.
Preprint
A scholarly manuscript posted to a public preprint server prior to formal peer review and journal publication, made openly accessible, citable via a persistent identifier (typically a DOI), and bearing a clearly identified version state.
Mentoring agreement
A documented (often written) understanding between mentor and mentee setting out the goals, frequency of meetings, mode of communication, scope of mentoring, expectations on both parties, confidentiality boundaries, and review schedule for the relationship.
Sponsorship relationship
A career-development relationship in which a senior researcher (sponsor) uses their social and political capital actively on behalf of a more junior researcher's career advancement — through nomination, recommendation, public advocacy, or introductions — going beyond the advisory dyad of mentorship.
Two-page narrative
A common page-limited narrative-CV format in which a researcher describes their contributions to research, people, and the wider community within a strict two-page limit, used in UKRI R4RI and several European national funder applications.
Diversity statement
A document — typically 1-2 pages — in which a researcher articulates their contributions to and plans for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in research and teaching, increasingly required in US faculty job applications and some research-funding contexts.
Teaching statement
A document — typically 1-3 pages — in which a researcher articulates their philosophy of teaching, summary of teaching experience and approach, and evidence of teaching effectiveness, used in academic job applications and tenure cases.
Research statement
A document — typically 2-5 pages — in which a researcher describes their research programme: past contributions, current projects, and planned trajectory, written for academic job applications, fellowship applications, or research-evaluation exercises.
Personal statement
A short narrative section in a researcher's CV, biosketch, or grant application in which the researcher articulates in their own voice why they are qualified to undertake the proposed work, their career trajectory, and any contextual factors relevant to the assessment.
Biosketch
A short, structured biographical document used in US federal research grant applications (most notably NIH and NSF) summarising a researcher's qualifications, positions, contributions, and a curated subset of their outputs, in a tightly page-limited format.
Narrative CV
A researcher curriculum vitae format that uses prose narrative descriptions of contributions, career trajectory, and impact in place of (or alongside) traditional structured lists of publications, grants, and metrics, intended to give context to outputs and recognise broader research contributions.
Resume for Researchers (R4RI)
A structured narrative-CV format developed by the Royal Society (UK) which asks researchers to describe their contributions under four headings: contributions to knowledge generation; contributions to development of individuals; contributions to the wider research community; and contributions to broader society.
Career interruption
A near-synonym of career break used by some funders (notably the Royal Society and ERC) to denote a period of reduced or absent research activity due to defined personal circumstances; sometimes also used to include reduced-fraction working (less than full-time) rather than complete absence.
Career break
A documented absence from active research work of at least three months' duration arising from parental leave, caring responsibilities, illness, disability, military service, or other personal circumstances, recognised by funders as extending early-career-researcher eligibility windows pro-rata.
Supervisor (doctoral)
The academic appointed by an institution to guide a doctoral candidate's research, with formal responsibility for the academic quality of supervision, progress monitoring, ethical conduct of the research, and recommendation for examination, in accordance with the institution's doctoral regulations.
Sponsor (career)
A senior researcher or leader who actively advocates for a more junior researcher's career advancement — nominating them for opportunities, opening doors, vouching for them in evaluations — distinct from a mentor (who advises) by the action of using social and political capital on the mentee's behalf.
Mentee
A researcher (typically more junior) who receives career, intellectual, or professional guidance from a mentor in a defined or recognised mentoring relationship, distinct from a supervisee in that the relationship lacks formal evaluative authority.
Mentor
An experienced researcher who provides career, intellectual, or professional guidance to a less experienced researcher (the mentee), distinct from a formal supervisor in that the mentoring relationship is typically chosen rather than assigned, may cross institutional lines, and does not carry formal evaluative authority.
Co-investigator
A named investigator on a research grant, contract, or protocol other than the lead PI, who contributes substantive scientific expertise and shares responsibility for portions of the work, typically with a defined role in the proposal and a named budget allocation.
Principal investigator (PI)
The named individual on a research grant, contract, or protocol who is formally accountable for the scientific direction, ethical conduct, financial stewardship, and reporting of the research, typically holding a continuing academic or research-leader position at the host institution.
Research associate
A staff researcher (often post-doctoral, sometimes post-master's) employed in a role with substantive scientific contribution and a degree of intellectual independence, typically more senior than a research assistant but not yet an independent principal investigator.
Research assistant
A staff member employed to provide research support — data collection, literature search, analysis, administration — to a research project under the direction of a more senior researcher, typically without independent design authority over the project.
Master’s-level researcher
A researcher whose highest qualification is a master's degree (MSc, MA, MRes, MPhil, etc.) engaged in research work in a role appropriate to that qualification, distinct from doctoral candidates and from those with bachelor's-only qualifications.
Pre-doctoral researcher
A researcher engaged in research work prior to commencing a doctoral programme, typically in roles such as research assistant, lab technician, or research associate at the master's-equivalent level, where the position involves substantive research rather than only support tasks.
Doctoral candidate
A student enrolled in a doctoral degree programme (PhD, DPhil, EdD, EngD, MD, etc.) who is undertaking original research toward a thesis or equivalent capstone, under the supervision of one or more academic supervisors.
Post-doctoral researcher
A researcher who has been awarded a doctoral degree and is engaged in a temporary, fixed-term position primarily devoted to research, typically under the supervision of a principal investigator, with the intention of further developing as an independent researcher.
Senior researcher
A researcher at an advanced career stage (typically 15+ years post-PhD) with a sustained record of independent research leadership, mentoring of multiple researchers to independence, substantial competitive funding history, and recognised disciplinary contribution.
Mid-career researcher
A researcher beyond the early-career window but not yet at senior leadership status — typically 8-20 years post-PhD with an established independent research programme, lab or group, and a track record of competitive funding and mentoring.
Early-career researcher (ECR)
A researcher within a defined number of years (typically 5-8) of their first doctoral degree, or — for researchers without a doctorate — within an equivalent period of full-time research practice, accounting for career breaks and part-time work.
Co-corresponding author convention
The practice of designating two or more authors as jointly corresponding on a published work, each taking responsibility for post-publication communication, editorial liaison, and queries about the work, with all co-corresponding authors typically marked by a symbol in the byline.
Reviewer role typology
A controlled vocabulary for distinguishing types of peer-review activity — e.g., manuscript peer reviewer, grant reviewer, conference programme committee member, data peer reviewer, software peer reviewer, reproducibility reviewer — used to give differentiated credit for review work.
“Degree of contribution” qualifier (lead/equal/supporting)
The optional CRediT modifier that may be applied to any of the 14 CRediT roles to indicate the relative magnitude of a contributor's input: 'lead' (primary responsibility), 'equal' (co-equal with one or more others), or 'supporting' (contributed but did not lead).
Conceptualization lead vs supporting
Under the CRediT taxonomy, the distinction between the contributor who led the formulation of the overarching research question, aims, or ideas for a project (Conceptualization: lead) and those who contributed to but did not originate the conceptual framing (Conceptualization: supporting).
Funding-acquisition lead vs supporting
Under the CRediT taxonomy, the distinction between the contributor who led the funding acquisition for a research project (typically the named principal investigator on the grant) and contributors who supported but did not lead the proposal (co-investigators, named collaborators).
Methodology consultant
A specialist who provides substantive advice on research methodology — study design, sampling, instrument selection, analytic strategy, or implementation approach — to a research project on which they are not a primary investigator.
Data validator
A contributor whose role is to check the integrity, accuracy, completeness, and conformance to schema of a dataset before its use, deposit, or publication — including range checks, plausibility tests, cross-source comparison, and metadata verification.
Reproducibility reviewer
A reviewer whose specific role is to verify that the computational, analytic, or experimental procedures reported in a manuscript can be re-executed by another party using the provided code, data, and instructions, distinct from a content peer reviewer.
Domain expert advisor
A subject-matter expert (clinical, technical, policy, lived-experience) who advises a research project on questions within their expertise — typically through formal advisory boards, steering committees, or focused consultations — distinct from co-authorship or formal investigator roles.
Indigenous-knowledge holder contribution
Substantive contribution to research from Indigenous knowledge keepers, elders, or community members who hold and share traditional knowledge, ecological observations, language, or cultural expertise relevant to the research, in accordance with CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.
Citizen-scientist contribution
Substantive contribution to research by members of the public participating as volunteers in data collection, classification, observation, analysis, or interpretation, distinct from being a study subject and distinct from professional research staff.
Patient-partner contribution (PPI)
Substantive input from patients, service users, carers, or members of the public into the design, conduct, analysis, or dissemination of health and care research — as partners in the research process rather than as study participants.
Lab leadership (supervision extension)
Substantive oversight of a research team or laboratory by a principal investigator or group leader, including scientific direction, resource allocation, mentoring, and accountability for research conduct, recognised under CRediT 'Supervision' and increasingly through narrative-CV team-leadership categories.
Equipment provision (resources extension)
The provision of specialised equipment, reagents, materials, animals, samples, or computational infrastructure that materially enabled a research output, captured under CRediT 'Resources' or in acknowledgements when the contribution does not include intellectual input on the work itself.
Open-software contribution
The development, documentation, packaging, testing, or maintenance of research software released under an open-source licence, including authoring new code, contributing to existing projects, releasing reusable libraries, or operating long-term maintenance.
Open-data contribution
The substantive work of preparing, documenting, depositing, and maintaining a research dataset in a FAIR-aligned open repository under a permissive licence, distinct from the original data collection.
Medical writer contribution
Professional writing assistance to drafting a biomedical manuscript by a person whose primary role is writing rather than research — including drafting, restructuring, language polishing, and preparing submission — disclosed transparently per Good Publication Practice (GPP) guidelines.
Statistical consultancy
Substantive statistical advice or analysis provided by a statistician to a research project — including study design, sample-size calculation, analytic plan, model selection, code, or interpretation — that materially shapes the research's quantitative findings.
Translator contribution
The intellectual work of converting a scholarly work from one natural language to another while preserving meaning, register, and technical accuracy, including the translator's own scholarly judgement on terminology, idiom, and disciplinary convention.
Mentorship contribution
Career, intellectual, or methodological guidance provided to a researcher (typically more junior) that shapes the conduct or development of their research, distinct from formal supervision (which has institutional authority) and from co-authorship (which requires direct work on the output).
Pre-submission feedback contribution
Substantive intellectual input — comments, critique, suggested revisions, or methodological advice — provided by a colleague on a draft manuscript or proposal before it is submitted to a journal or funder, recognised in acknowledgements rather than as authorship.
Editorial contribution
Intellectual work performed in the role of editor for a scholarly venue — including soliciting submissions, selecting reviewers, synthesising review feedback, making accept/reject/revise decisions, and shaping the venue's scope and standards.
Peer reviewer contribution
The intellectual labour of evaluating a scholarly submission's validity, originality, significance, and clarity for a journal, funder, or conference, distinct from authorship and from editorial decision-making.
Technical staff contribution
Substantive technical work — laboratory technique, instrument operation, data acquisition, sample preparation, software engineering, or facility operation — performed by research-support staff (technicians, engineers, lab managers) that materially enables a research output.
Non-author contributor
An individual who made a meaningful contribution to a research output but is not listed in the author byline, typically because the contribution is partial (does not meet all authorship criteria) or because they declined authorship.
Acknowledged contributor
An individual whose contribution to a research output is recognised in the acknowledgements section rather than by authorship, typically because their contribution does not meet all four ICMJE authorship criteria but is substantive enough to warrant named credit.
Model versioning
The practice of identifying a specific revision of an AI model by name, version number, release date, or content hash, sufficient to uniquely distinguish it from earlier or later revisions that may behave differently on the same input.
Inference
The process of generating outputs from a trained AI model in response to inputs at runtime, distinct from training (which updates model parameters); for LLMs, inference is the production of completions from prompts.
Fine-tuning
The process of further training a pre-trained foundation model on a smaller, task-specific or domain-specific dataset, updating some or all parameters, to specialise its behaviour while retaining general capability.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
An AI architecture in which an LLM is augmented at inference time with documents retrieved from an external corpus (often via vector similarity search), so that the model's outputs are grounded in retrieved evidence rather than relying solely on parametric knowledge.
AI in literature search
The use of AI-powered tools (Elicit, Consensus, Scite, Undermind, Semantic Scholar's AI features) to discover, screen, summarise, or synthesise scholarly literature, distinguished from traditional keyword search by the use of embeddings, LLM summarisation, or generative answering over a literature corpus.
AI in qualitative coding
The use of LLMs or other AI tools to assign codes, themes, or categories to qualitative data (interview transcripts, open-ended survey responses, field notes), either as the sole coder, a second coder for reliability, or a first-pass triage to be human-reviewed.
AI image generation
The use of a generative model (diffusion models, GANs, autoregressive image models) to produce images from text prompts, image prompts, or other conditioning inputs, distinct from AI-assisted image editing of an existing real image.
AI summarisation
The use of an AI system to produce a shorter version of a text that preserves its key information, including abstracts, lay summaries, executive summaries, and literature digests, whether extractive (sentence selection) or abstractive (paraphrasing).
AI translation
The use of an AI system (rule-based, statistical, or neural) to convert text from one natural language to another, including specifically the use of LLMs and dedicated neural machine translation systems for translating scholarly works or portions thereof.
AI in editorial decisions
The use of AI tools by journal editors to triage, screen, or make decisions on submitted manuscripts, including desk-rejection screening, reviewer matching, plagiarism flagging, or assessment of fit — distinguished by whether the AI advises a human editor or substitutes for one.
AI in peer review
The use of generative AI tools by peer reviewers to assist in evaluating manuscripts — including summarisation, language editing of the review, or generation of review text — which is restricted or prohibited by many publishers due to confidentiality and originality concerns.
Generative-AI disclosure statement
A dedicated section in a manuscript — typically headed 'Use of Generative AI' or similar — that consolidates all disclosures of AI tool use across the work, including tools used, versions, sections affected, and the human authors' verification process.
AI co-authorship rejection (ICMJE 2023)
The 2023 update to ICMJE's Recommendations stating explicitly that chatbots and generative AI systems cannot be listed as authors because they cannot satisfy any of the four ICMJE authorship criteria, in particular the requirement to be accountable for the work and to approve the version to be published.
Author responsibility (for AI use)
The principle that human authors retain full responsibility for the accuracy, integrity, originality, ethical sourcing, and lack of plagiarism of all content in a scholarly work, regardless of which portions were drafted, suggested, or generated by an AI tool.
Acknowledgement (vs authorship for AI)
The convention, codified by ICMJE and COPE (2023), that AI tool use must be disclosed in the methods or acknowledgements section of a scholarly work rather than via the author byline or CRediT contributor list, because AI cannot satisfy authorship's accountability requirements.
Training data provenance
Documentation of the sources, collection methods, licensing, consent basis, time range, and processing steps applied to the data used to train an AI model, sufficient to assess fitness-for-purpose, legal compliance, and potential bias.
Data leakage (training)
The contamination of an AI model's training corpus with data that should have remained held-out — including evaluation benchmarks, test sets, or proprietary content — such that the model's apparent performance overstates its true generalisation ability or it can reproduce content it should not have seen.
AI fairness
A property of an AI system whereby its outputs satisfy a defined criterion of equitable treatment across specified groups — common criteria include demographic parity, equalised odds, equal opportunity, and calibration parity — recognising that these criteria are often mutually incompatible.
AI bias
Systematic skew in an AI system's outputs that produces unjustified differential treatment, accuracy, or representation across groups, tasks, or contexts, arising from training-data composition, model architecture, objective function, or deployment context.
Detection tool (AI-generated)
A software system that estimates the probability that a given piece of content (text, image) was produced by a generative AI system, typically by analysing statistical features of the output without access to provenance metadata.
AI provenance
The chain of evidence — metadata, cryptographic signatures, watermarks, or attestations — that documents whether a piece of content was produced or modified by an AI system, by which system, when, and under what prompt or input.
Watermarking (AI output)
The embedding of a statistical, cryptographic, or visible signal into AI-generated content at the time of generation, allowing later identification of that content as machine-produced — distinct from post-hoc detection which infers AI origin from features of the output alone.
Synthetic image
An image produced by a generative model (e.g., diffusion model, GAN) rather than captured from a physical scene or instrument, including images used as illustrations, in figures, or as training data.
Synthetic data
Data generated by a model or algorithm rather than collected from real-world observations or experiments, designed to mimic the statistical structure of real data for purposes such as augmentation, privacy-preservation, or model training.
Hallucination
An output from a generative AI system that is presented confidently and fluently but is factually incorrect, fabricated, or unsupported by the input data or any verifiable source — including invented citations, non-existent authors, false statistics, and incorrect quotations.
System prompt
A prompt provided to an LLM at the start of a session — typically not visible to the end user — that sets persona, constraints, output format, safety rules, and tool-use permissions for all subsequent user interactions in that session.
Prompt engineering
The practice of designing, refining, and structuring input text given to a generative AI system in order to elicit specific desired outputs, including techniques such as role assignment, few-shot examples, chain-of-thought scaffolding, and output-format specification.
Generative AI
Artificial intelligence systems whose primary output is novel content (text, images, audio, video, code, or structured data) produced by sampling from a learned distribution, as distinct from discriminative AI systems whose output is a classification, score, or decision over existing inputs.
Large language model (LLM)
A neural-network model trained on large text corpora using self-supervised next-token prediction (or analogous objective), with parameter counts typically in the billions, capable of generating coherent text and performing a broad range of natural-language tasks without task-specific training.
AI tool disclosure
A statement within a scholarly work that identifies which generative AI tools were used, the version, the scope of use (e.g., language editing, code generation, figure creation), and which sections were affected, sufficient for a reader to assess the AI's role.
AI as author
The disallowed practice of listing a generative AI system (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude) in the author byline or contributor list of a scholarly work, on the rationale that AI cannot meet authorship criteria requiring accountability, agreement, and the capacity to take public responsibility.
AI-generated content
Text, images, code, or other artefacts produced substantively by a generative AI system in response to a prompt, where the AI is the proximate source of the content rather than a tool refining human-authored material.
AI-assisted writing
The use of a generative AI tool by a human author to draft, edit, paraphrase, summarise, or stylistically revise text where the human retains final editorial control and authorship responsibility.
Submission fee
Charge levied on author(s) upon submission of a manuscript to a journal, sometimes referred to as administrative or handling charges.
Subject repository
A repository the contents of which are connected purely by their discipline, rather than by other factors such as their institutional affiliation (see Institutional Repository)
Sharing
The extent to which a work can be discovered, accessed and reused by those other than the author(s); often defined or clarified by means of permissions, terms and conditions, or a license.
Reuse license
A set of terms and conditions that facilitates the reuse of published information.
Researcher webpage
A webpage featuring a researcher's profile, which possibly may also provide links to their publications.
Research funder
An organisation providing financial support for research activity.
Repository
Repositories preserve, manage, and provide access to many types of digital materials in a variety of formats.
Read only
Online content (data or information) that is capable of being displayed but not modified or deleted.
Pure gold journal
A scholarly journal that makes its articles immediately available online to the reader without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.
Publishing agreement
A legal contract between publisher and author(s) to publish written material by the author(s). This may involve a single written work, or a series of works.
Publish
A broad process or system that involves, at minimum, scholarship and writing, certification (most commonly via peer review), registration (commonly formal publishing in a journal or some other version of record), dissemination (awareness, making accessible, distribution), and archiving.
Publication permission
The circumstances under which copyright material may be used and where permission must be sought from the copyright holder.
Press embargo
A request by a source that the information or news provided by that source not be published until a certain date or certain conditions have been met.
Pre-print
Preliminary version of an article that has not undergone peer review but that may be shared for comment.
Post-print
A manuscript draft after it has been peer reviewed.
Page charge
One of a number of supplementary charges imposed by some journals to cover the cost of publishing, and charged in addition to article processing charges (APCs).
Open archive
A repository that is compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and therefore facilitates the sharing of metadata for a variety of purposes, most notably the compilation tasks performed by aggregator databases.
Open access
Making peer reviewed scholarly content freely available via the Internet.
Open access mandate
A policy requiring publication of research in an open access format.
Open access journal
A journal that makes its articles immediately available online to the reader without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. All the articles in the journal are available open access.
Licence
Signed agreement to exploit a piece of IP such as a process, product, data, or software.
Institutional webpage
A webpage that is associated with the institution at which the author is employed.
Institutional repository
An online, digital collection of research outputs (see Repository) that are connected by their affiliation with a specific institution. Institutional repositories are most commonly associated with universities and other academic organisations, and so the contents of a single institutional repository may therefore cover a range of disciplines. An institutional repository may often be managed as part of a wider suite of services supporting scholarly communication, Open Access and Open Education.
Hybrid journal
A subscription journal in which some of the articles are open access at point of publication. This status typically requires the payment of a specific publication fee (also called an article processing charge or APC) to the publisher.
Green open access
A type of open access where a version of a publication is freely available via an institutional or subject repository, or other web-accessible digital archive, that is compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
Gold open access
The publisher version of a publication is immediately and permanently freely available for anyone with internet access to read or download from the publisher site at the point of publication.
Free to read
Access, use, modify and re-use the content online. The adjective “free” is commonly used in one of two meanings: “for zero price” or “with little or no restriction”. Users can potentially do two kinds of things: (1) access and use it and (2) modify and re-use it.
Fee waiver
Full or partial waiver for article processing charges (APCs) offered by some publishers to authors based in selected developing countries or low-income economies.
Embargo
Restriction of access to the content of a copy of a work for a defined period of time.
Document version
During the development of a document there are usually several iterations of the work. There are periods along the authoring process that can be identified as a specific identifiable point where the work can be identified as a specific version of the work.
Deposit
The action of uploading a digital copy of a work into a digital repository or similar service by the author(s) or their agent, together with metadata that, ideally, supports FAIR principles (Findable; Accessible; Interoperable; Re-usable).
Date of start of embargo
The date that an embargo comes into force and from whence the length of the embargo period is counted. The start date of a period during which access to a document or file or record is restricted. This could be: “date of online publication” or “publication date” or “date of online availability” or “date of deposit”. This date and the triggering event to start the embargo are defined by the copyright holder or the repository governance or the law.
Date of publication
Date the work is made available to the public by a publisher.
Date of online publication
The date that a work was first published on an online publishing platform. This may be before or after the publication date of the print version.
Date of online availability
The date that a work was first made available online. This may be before or after the publication date.
Date of first open access
The date that a work was first made publicly available on an Open Access (OA) basis. For example, this could be the date that a copy of the work was made live (discoverable) on an OA basis on a repository or may be triggered when an embargo period expires. It could also be when an work was available on a publisher web site, or elsewhere, on an OA basis.
Date of end of embargo
Date after which deposited items become available to read and download on the web. The date of the last day of an embargo period.
Date of deposit
Date on which a copy of a version of a work and its metadata is deposited in a repository (or equivalent). Not necessarily the same as the date that the work becomes discoverable. A period of time may elapse after deposit, but before the record is made publicly available during which the record may be checked for accuracy and compliance by repository administration staff and an embargo may be applied.
Date of compliant deposit
Date on which a copy of a version of a work and its metadata is in a repository (or equivalent) and meets the requirements of a mandate, policy, piece of legislation etc.
Date of acceptance
The day on which the publisher or evaluation institution or committee confirms formally that the article has been received from the author and no substantial changes to the content are required. Also the date on which the publisher tells the author that the article will be published and the article is ready to be processed for publication.
Copyright
A legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution.
Copyright transfer agreement
A legal document containing provisions for the conveyance of full or partial copyright from the rights owner to another party.
Closed access
Restricting access to Internet content via a paid subscription; is often called a paywall.
Born open access
Commercial or non-profit publishers established for the sole purpose of publishing Open Access (OA) journals. They normally make use of the Creative Commons Attribution License for their publications. Authors usually retain their copyrights and users are needed to acknowledge and cite the authors in future references.
Author accepted manuscript
The author's final, peer reviewed and corrected manuscript, usually created in Word or LaTeX.
Article publication charge
Charge levied by a publisher to an author (or their funder or institution) to publish an article. Such charges may include but are not limited to: APCs; page charges; publishing charges or fees; submission charges; colour charges.
Article processing charge
Fee paid to journals to publish an article as open access.
Access
The continued, available for use, ongoing usability of a digital resource, retaining all qualities of authenticity, accuracy and functionality deemed to be essential for the purposes the digital material was created and/or acquired for. Users who have access can retrieve, manipulate, copy, and store copies on a wide range of hard drives and external devices.
