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Public Access Toolkit: Glossary of Terms

The public access toolkit provides guidance to researchers who receive funding from U.S. federal agencies and must comply with public access mandates.

Glossary of Terms

Findable: The first step in (re)using data is to find them. Metadata and data should be easy to find for both humans and computers. Machine-readable metadata are essential for automatic discovery of datasets and services. (From the FAIR Principles via Go FAIR)

Accessible: Non-proprietary and available to readers free of charge

Accessible (for people with disabilities): “Materials and technologies are designed in such a way that people with disabilities can acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services” as people who do not have disabilities. https://aem.cast.org/get-started/defining-accessibility 

Interoperable: Characteristics of systems and databases to work with data and be usable across multiple types of systems and databases

Reusable: Available in a technical format(s) that enables transformation into other formats, and under a license that permits adaptation and resharing

Freely Available: Available to anyone with internet access and without access barriers (e.g. no fee, no login)

Openly Licensed: Released under a license that allows non-commercial and/or non-commercial reuse, modification, and redistribution rights, such as CC0 or Creative Commons’ licenses, excluding No-Derivatives license.

Open Access: Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions (from Peter Suber's seminal 2013 book Open Access.) 

Public Access: This phrase refers to how the United States federal government defines public access in:

The 2013 OSTP Holdren memo: 

  • For publications: Ensure that the public can read, download, and analyze in digital form (Section 3a)

  • For data: Should be stored and publicly accessible for the public to search, retrieve, and analyze (Section 4)

And with additional specifications in the 2022 OSTP Nelson memo

  • All peer-reviewed scholarly publications authored or coauthored by individuals or institutions resulting from federally funded research are made freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.

  • Scientific data underlying peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research should be made freely available and publicly accessible by default at the time of publication, unless subject to limitations as described in Section 3(c)(i) and should be subject to federal agency guidelines for researcher responsibilities regarding data management and sharing plans, consistent with Section 3(c) of this memorandum.

Machine Readable: Having sufficiently standardized structure, metadata, and text-based representation of visual elements as to enable re-creation of content for various purposes