“It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.”

Green Mountain Coffee published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Kelby Carr available at: https://flic.kr/p/dcYrM1

It's a problem analogous to the irritation surrounding the naming of different sizes of coffee cups at your local caffeine-dispensary. Or perhaps a bit like the Big Train sketch where no one speaks English. Danny Kingsley hinted at this during her talk at RLUK;

If you've got particular language and jargon that’s what defines your discipline. So if you’re in a discipline that uses vernacular words like Scholarly Communication does, it’s really difficult… Words are a problem in the area of Scholarly Communication. 

The value of embracing unknown unknowns.

Open Access has suffered from a confusion of language for a long time now. Pre-print, post-print, what does it all mean, and according to whom? The CASRAI Dictionary project is meant to overcome this, however you will only find entries for two items, Preprint, and Journal Article. The later being not especially helpful for our purposes.

So to sate my curiosity more than anything, I took a closer look at the Open Access policies from different publishers, funders, and governing bodies and made note of the terms they were using. Of all the places I looked the report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings (Finch Report) was the only document that clearly identified all the stages in the publication process, and named them explicitly. For simplicities sake, the terms used in the Finch Report are the terms I will use for the rest of this post.

Finch Report	Author’s Original	Submitted Manuscript Under Review	Accepted Manuscript	Version of Record	Corrected Version of Record
CASRAI	Preprint			Journal Article
SHERPA	Pre-Print		Post-Print	Publisher’s Version
Elsevier	Preprint		Accepted Manuscript	Published Journal Article
Wiley	Submitted Version		Accepted Version	Version of Record
Taylor & Francis			Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM)	Version of Record
Springer			Author’s Accepted Manuscript	Final Published Version
SAGE	Version 1		Version 2	Version 3
Wellcome Trust			Final Peer Reviewed Manuscript	Publisher’s PDF Version
RCUK	Online Manuscript Version		Accepted Manuscript	Final Published Version
HEFCE	Output		Author’s Accepted and Final Peer-Reviewed Text	Final Published Version of Record

Notice how there is nothing between Accepted Manuscript and Version of Record? Nowhere I looked could I find reference to the typeset version of the journal article, or proof, that many authors receive after the peer review process. After the Version of Record, this is the second most erroneously deposited type of document. Probably because no-one knows what to call it when talking about it - authors often think this is what we mean when we ask for the Accepted Manuscript. Neither did anyone talk about what to call a Version of Record that has been subjected to amendments, corrections, errata, or retraction and how such an article fits into the Open Access landscape.

So why does all of this confusion exist in the first place? Why do these corporations and organisations persist on creating confusion by using different terminology. While I have no hard evidence, I suspect that the confusion is deliberate - it benefits the publishers after all. Though as Hanlon's razor goes, "never attribute to malice that which is easily explained by stupidity."