# Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications/Annex B: Abbreviations

​ Annex B: List of Abbreviations
| AHRC | Arts and Humanities Research Council, one of the seven Research Councils in the UK |
| ALPSP | Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, an international association of not-for-profit publishers, based in the UK |
| APC | Article Processing or Publishing Charge, the fee charged for publication charged by open access and hybrid journals |
| ARL | Association of Research Libraries, an association of 126 research libraries in the United States and Canada |
| BBSRC | Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, one of the seven Research Councils in the UK |
| BMC | BioMedCentral, and open access publisher of over 220 journals, owned by Springer Science+ Business Media |
| BMJ | A journal, formerly called the British Medical Journal, published by the BMJ Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association |
| CC-BY | A copyright licence developed by the Creative Commons organisation under which users are allowed to share content and create derivative works, even for commercial use, so long as attribution is given |
| CEPA | Cambridge Economic Policy Associates, an economic and financial policy advisory business based in London |
| CERIF | Common European Research Information Format, a set of standards for information about different elements in the research process, developed with the support of the European Commission |
| CNRS | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the largest government research organisation in France, under the supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research |
| COAR | Confederation of Open Access Repositories, an association of repository initiatives launched in 2009 |
| DASH | Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, a central open-access repository of research by members of Harvard University |
| DfG | Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, a German research funding organisation which supports research in science, engineering, and the humanities |
| DOAJ | Directory of Open Access Journals, a website maintained by Lund University which lists open access journals |
| DOI | Digital Object Identifier, a character string used to identify an object such as an electronic document uniquely. Metadata about the object is stored in association with the DOI name and may include a location, such as a URL, where the object can be found. The DOI for a document is permanent, whereas its location may change |
| ESRC | Economic and Social Research Council, one of the seven Research Councils in the UK |
| EU | European Union, the confederation of 27 member states in Europe ​ |
| FP7 | The EU’s seventh framework programme for research and technological development: the EU's main instrument for funding research in Europe, running from 2007 to 2013 |
| GDP | Gross Domestic Product, the market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period |
| GERD | Gross Expenditure on Research and Development, the OECD’s measure of total intramural expenditure on research and development performed on the national territory during a given period |
| HE | Higher Education |
| HEFCE | Higher Education Funding Council for England, the agency which distributes public money for higher education to universities and colleges in England |
| HTML | HyperText Markup Language, the main markup language for web pages |
| JISC | Formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee, an agency that support spost-16 and higher education and research by providing leadership in the use of information and communications technologyin learning, teaching, research and administration. It is funded by the UK higher education funding councils |
| LISU | Library and Information Statistics Unit, a research and information centre for library and information services, based at Loughborough University |
| MRC | Medical Research Council, one of the seven Research Councils in the UK |
| NESLi2 | Formerly the National Electronic Site Licensing Initiative, the national initiative for licensing online journals on behalf of the higher and further education and research communities in the UK |
| NHS | National Health Service, the publicly-funded health services in the UK |
| NIH | National Institutes of Health, the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research |
| NLM | National Library of Medicine, a division of the NIH which runs the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which houses biological databases (including PubMed and PubMed Central) that are freely accessible on the internet |
| OAI-PMH | Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, a protocol used to harvest (or collect) the metadata descriptions of the records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives |
| OAPEN | Open Access Publishing in European Networks, a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable open access publication model for academic books in the humanities and social sciences. OAPEN-UK is a parallel project gathering evidence to help stakeholders make informed decisions on the future of open access scholarly monograph publishing. |
| OECD | Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the international economic organisation of 34 countries founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade |
| PDF | Portable document format, a file format used to represent documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems |
| PLoS | Public Library of Science, a not-for-profit publisher of open access journals that began operation in 2003. Its seven journals include PLosOne, which now publishes more articles than any other journal in the world. ​ |
| PMC | PubMedCentral, a free digital database of full-text scientific literature in biomedical and life sciences, developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine as an online archive of biomedical journal articles |
| POD | Print on demand, a printing technology and business process in which new copies of a book or other document are not printed until an order has been received, which means books can be printed one at a time |
| PPV | Pay-per-view, payments for a service under which readers can gain access to journal articles |
| QR | Quality-related research funding, provided to support the research infrastructure necessary for universities in the UK to conduct research, including permanent academic staff salaries, premises, libraries and central computing costs |
| R&D | Research and development, creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge, including knowledge of man, culture and society, and the use of this stock of knowledge to devise new applications |
| RCUK | Research Councils UK, a strategic partnership between the UK Research Councils, its work undertaken by employees of the seven Councils who use the term RCUK only when engaging in joint action |
| REF | Research Excellence Framework, the successor to the Research Assessment Exercise, a method of assessing the research of UK higher education institutions. The first REF exercise will take place in 2014 to assess research that has taken place during the period 2008–2013. |
| RePEc | Research Papers in Economics, a database of working papers, preprints, journal articles and software components relating to research in economics |
| RFC | Request for Comments published by the Internet Engineering Task Force |
| SHEDL | Scottish Higher Education Digital Library, a regional consortium purchasing agreement that provides staff and students in all Scotland’s universities access to electronic journals published by a number of publishers |
| SMEs | Small and medium-sized enterprises. In Europe, there are three broad parameters which define SMEs: micro-entities are companies with up to 10 employees; small companies employ up to 50 workers, whilst medium-sized enterprises have up to 250 employees.[1] SMEs are also defined as firms with either revenues of €10–50 million or a balance-sheet total of €10–43m |
| SOAP | Study of Open Access Publishing, a study funded by the EU to describe and analyse models of open access publishing |
| SPARC | Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an international alliance of academic and research libraries developed by the ARL 1998 which promotes open access |
| SSRN | Social Science Research Network, a website devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities |
| STM | Science, technology and medicine. Also used as an abbreviation for the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers |
| UCL | University College London |
| UKPMC | UK PubMed Central, an on-line database that offers free access to biomedical and health research information, based on the model of PubMedCentral in the US ​ |
| URL | Uniform resource locator, a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an internet resource |
| UUK | Universities UK, the representative organisation for the UK’s universities |
| VAT | Value Added Tax, a tax on the consumption of goods and services in the EU |
| XML | Extensible Markup Language, a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machinereadable |