Terminology of drafts in scholarly publication

Abstract

Author’s version, accepted draft, corrected proof, proof, version of record, peer-reviewed, double-blind reviewed, preprint, e-print and similar concepts appear in the context of electronic publishing, including open access (OA) options and repository services. Terms are used widely, but not with a common interpretation across scholarly communication, research tenders, OA mandates of research bodies, journals’ home pages and publishers’ self-archiving policies. Versions of scholarly works form special types of documents, which may be regarded as grey literature. These include variations from rough drafts to the final, latest “online first view” proofs and successive drafts of corrected/enhanced published works. Increasingly they are made publicly available in repositories, often without metadata about the changes, the provenance and the status of the paper; hence the proliferation of different article versions generates problems in providing users (researchers) with authoritative information. This article presents the ongoing international and Hungarian context of the matter, collects, systematizes and makes clear the version types, terms and definitions of academic papers within publishing processes. Traditional and recently emerged nomenclature are detailed and compared. The results can be beneficial to identifying related concepts, expanding controlled vocabularies, building multilingual glossaries, designing ontologies as well as improving information systems and repositories by version handling.