• Accepted author manuscript (AAM)

The accepted version of a paper following peer review and with revisions made, but without copy-editing or formatting contributed by the publisher.

• Black Open Access refers to illegal or pirated versions of articles. Sci-Hub (SciHub) is an example of a platform hosting illegal open access content. The content available through this platform infringes the copyright of many scholarly publishers. Charles Sturt Library does not support the use of Sci-Hub or other illegal article-sharing platforms. 

• CC

Creative Commons (CC) is an internationally active non-profit organisation that provides free licences for creators to use when making their work available to the public. Each licence uses CC to indicate it is a Creative Commons licence.

• Embargo

Some publishers allow the author's accepted version of a work to be made available after an ‘embargo period’. This is a period of time before which a work that has been deposited into an institutional repository can be made open access. Embargo periods can vary from 6 to 36 months, 12 months being the most common in science and health disciplines and 18-24 months in Social Sciences and humanities.

• Offprint

An offprint is a separate printing of a work that originally appeared as part of a larger publication, usually one of composite authorship, such as an academic journal, magazine, or edited book. Wikipedia

Authors use offprints to promote their work and ensure wider dissemination and longer life than might have been achieved through the original publication alone. Historically, the exchange of offprints has been a method of correspondence between scholars.

Some publishers actively support scholarly sharing of offprints in order to promote published articles, e.g.

• Preprint

In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may persist, often as a non-typeset version available free, after a paper is published in a journal. Wikipedia

The key to the definition of “preprint” is in the prefix “pre”. A preprint is the author’s original manuscript before formally publishing it in a journal. One of the primary purposes of preprints is that they allow authors to collect feedback on their work and improve it before submitting it for formal peer review and publication. Prints are often made available by a discipline-specific repository or archive, such as arXiv