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| 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 |
