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Creative work – An original, identifiable piece of content, such as an academic paper, a diagram, a photograph, or a video clip. Owners of creative works have rights, such as copyright, that they might reserve to keep control of the…

Publisher – a company (institution) whose purpose is to make the outputs of research publicly available.

Funder – an institute, corporation or government body that provides financial assistance for research.

Paywall – restriction via a financial barrier to research, often implemented by legacy publishers. Can be removed by personal or institutional subscription. See Loginwall for a barrier that prevents access, without asking for money to unlock access.

Sharing – the joint use of a resource or space. A fundamental aspect of collaborative research. As most research is digitally-authored & digitally-published, the resulting digital content is non-rivalrous and can be shared without any loss to the original creator.

Publishing – to make a research output available to the public. Commonly refers to the release of works by publishers, irrespective of whether public access is granted or not.

Repeatability – the similarity between results of a study or experiment and independent results obtained with the same methods and under identical conditions (i.e., pertains to methods and analysis).

Reproducibility – the similarity between results of a study or experiment and independent results obtained with the same methods but under different conditions (i.e., pertains to results).

Embargo period – a length of time imposed on a research output for users who have not paid for access, or do not have institutional access, before it is made freely available.

Institutional Repository – An online database designed to collect the intellectual output of a particular institution or university, including digital collections such as electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), pre-prints, or faculty scholarship, and presents associated metadata regarding the these items

Repository (software) – a collection of files managed with version control software (e.g., bzr, hg, git, csv, svn, etc.). Can be hosted by third-party (e.g., github, bitbucket, sourceforge), by an institution, or self-hosted locally.

Open Source Software (OSS) – availability of source code for a piece of software, along with an open source license permitting reuse, adaptation, and further distribution.