This glossary explains operational, technical, commercial, regulatory, and editorial terminology used across Media & Entertainment. It helps executives and practitioners working in Publishing & Information Media interpret the standards, systems, identifiers, metrics, and programs central to print and digital publishing.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T V W X
| A | |
| a11y | Accessibility: A numeronym used for practices that make publications and digital information usable by people with disabilities, including accessible structure, navigation, typography, images, and mathematics. |
| AAM | Alliance for Audited Media: A North American nonprofit organization that verifies circulation, audience, and distribution data for publishers and advertisers, supporting credible media measurement. |
| AAM | Author Accepted Manuscript: The version of a scholarly article accepted after peer review but before the publisher’s final copyediting, typesetting, and branding. Repository and funder policies often specify whether this version may be shared. |
| AAP | Association of American Publishers: A trade association representing major U.S. book, journal, educational, and digital-content publishers on policy, market, copyright, and industry matters. |
| ABA | American Booksellers Association: A U.S. trade association for independent booksellers whose programs, data, and retail relationships are important to book distribution and publisher sales strategies. |
| ABC | Audit Bureau of Circulations: An independent circulation-audit body used in several national media markets to verify print and digital distribution claims for newspapers, magazines, and other publications. |
| ADA | Americans with Disabilities Act: A U.S. civil-rights law that informs accessibility obligations for digital publications, websites, subscription services, and other public-facing information products. |
| ALPSP | Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers: An international membership organization supporting scholarly and professional publishers through standards engagement, training, research, and industry policy work. |
| AOP | Association of Online Publishers: A trade body representing digital publishing businesses and addressing audience measurement, commercial models, regulation, and sustainable online media operations. |
| APC | Article Processing Charge: A fee charged to an author, institution, or funder to support publication of an article, commonly under an open-access model. |
| ARC | Advance Reading Copy: A prepublication edition distributed to reviewers, booksellers, librarians, and other influencers to support reviews, ordering, and launch planning. |
| ARIA | Accessible Rich Internet Applications: A W3C specification providing semantic attributes that help assistive technologies interpret interactive web content, including digital reading platforms and publication interfaces. |
| ARK | Archival Resource Key: A persistent identifier designed to provide durable links to digital objects, including articles, books, datasets, and archival publications. |
| ASIN | Amazon Standard Identification Number: A unique product identifier assigned within Amazon’s catalog and used by publishers to manage listings, editions, inventory, and sales reporting. |
| B | |
| BIBFRAME | Bibliographic Framework: A Library of Congress data model intended to express bibliographic information as linked data, affecting how publication metadata can be exchanged and discovered. |
| BIC | Book Industry Communication: A UK book-industry organization that develops supply-chain standards and best practices for metadata, identifiers, accessibility, distribution, and transactional workflows. |
| BISAC | Book Industry Standards and Communications: A North American subject-classification scheme used by publishers, distributors, retailers, and libraries to categorize books and support discovery and merchandising. |
| BISG | Book Industry Study Group: A U.S. membership organization that develops standards, research, and best practices for book metadata, supply chains, rights, subject codes, and publishing operations. |
| BOAI | Budapest Open Access Initiative: A foundational statement defining open access to scholarly literature and promoting repositories and open-access journals as complementary publishing routes. |
| BPC | Book Processing Charge: A fee paid by an author, institution, or funder to support publication of an open-access scholarly book or monograph. |
| C | |
| C2PA | Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity: An industry coalition developing technical specifications for recording the origin and editing history of digital content, helping news and information publishers demonstrate authenticity. |
| CC | Creative Commons: A nonprofit organization and standardized licensing framework that enables creators and publishers to grant defined permissions for reuse, distribution, and adaptation. |
| CC0 | Creative Commons Zero: A public-domain dedication tool through which a rights holder waives copyright and related rights to the fullest extent legally possible. |
| CC BY | Creative Commons Attribution: A license permitting copying, redistribution, and adaptation for any purpose provided appropriate credit is given. |
| CC BY-NC | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial: A license allowing reuse and adaptation with attribution, but not for primarily commercial purposes. |
| CC BY-NC-ND | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives: A license allowing attributed, noncommercial redistribution only when the publication remains unchanged and complete. |
| CC BY-NC-SA | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: A license permitting noncommercial adaptation with attribution when derivative works are distributed under the same license. |
| CC BY-ND | Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives: A license permitting redistribution, including commercial redistribution, with attribution when the work is passed along unchanged and in full. |
| CC BY-SA | Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike: A license allowing reuse and adaptation for any purpose with attribution, provided derivative works use the same license. |
| CCC | Copyright Clearance Center: A rights-licensing and content-solutions organization that enables publishers and users to manage permissions, collective licenses, royalties, and authorized reuse. |
| CIP | Cataloging in Publication: Bibliographic data prepared by a national library before a book is published, allowing publishers to print standardized cataloging information and helping libraries process new titles. |
| CLOCKSS | Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe: A distributed preservation service that safeguards scholarly content and can make preserved material openly available if it is no longer accessible from its original source. |
| CMYK | Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key: The four-color subtractive model used in commercial printing, with “key” ordinarily referring to the black printing plate. |
| CMS | Content Management System: Software for creating, editing, approving, organizing, and publishing content across websites, apps, newsletters, and other digital products. |
| COPE | Committee on Publication Ethics: An organization that provides guidance to editors and publishers on research integrity, peer review, authorship, corrections, retractions, and misconduct cases. |
| COUNTER | Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources: A standards organization whose Code of Practice defines consistent usage reporting for journals, books, databases, and other electronic resources. |
| CRediT | Contributor Roles Taxonomy: A standardized taxonomy describing specific contributions to scholarly work, such as conceptualization, investigation, data curation, writing, and supervision. |
| CSS | Cascading Style Sheets: A web standard controlling the visual presentation of structured content and an important component of responsive websites and EPUB publications. |
| CTP | Computer-to-Plate: A prepress process that transfers digital page files directly to printing plates, reducing intermediate film steps and improving production speed and consistency. |
| D | |
| DAISY | Digital Accessible Information System: A standard for accessible digital books that supports structured navigation, synchronized text and audio, and use with assistive technologies. |
| DAM | Digital Asset Management: A system and operating discipline for storing, tagging, controlling, finding, and distributing images, layouts, manuscripts, video, and other reusable content assets. |
| DCMI | Dublin Core Metadata Initiative: An organization maintaining widely used metadata terms for describing digital and physical resources, improving content exchange and discovery. |
| DMCA | Digital Millennium Copyright Act: A U.S. law governing online copyright protection, safe-harbor procedures, takedown notices, and circumvention of technological protection measures. |
| DOAB | Directory of Open Access Books: A discovery service that indexes peer-reviewed open-access books and helps libraries, researchers, and readers identify legitimate openly available monographs. |
| DOAJ | Directory of Open Access Journals: An independent index of open-access journals that applies defined transparency and publishing-practice criteria to participating titles. |
| DOI | Digital Object Identifier: A persistent identifier for articles, books, chapters, datasets, and other objects that supports durable linking, citation, metadata exchange, and usage tracking. |
| DORA | Declaration on Research Assessment: The San Francisco Declaration advocates evaluating research on its own merits rather than relying primarily on journal-level metrics such as impact factors. |
| DPI | Dots per Inch: A measure of printer or output-device resolution that affects the sharpness of text, line art, and images in printed publications. |
| DRM | Digital Rights Management: Technologies and controls that restrict access, copying, printing, lending, or redistribution of e-books and other digital publications. |
| DTD | Document Type Definition: A formal specification defining the permitted structure and elements of an XML or SGML document, supporting consistent production and content validation. |
| DTP | Desktop Publishing: The creation and layout of publication-ready pages using computer software, including typography, images, pagination, and prepress preparation. |
| E | |
| EAA | European Accessibility Act: European Union legislation establishing accessibility requirements for specified products and services, including e-books, e-readers, and e-commerce services. |
| EAN | European Article Number: The legacy name for the retail barcode numbering system now incorporated into GS1 standards; EAN-13 barcodes are commonly used to encode ISBNs on books. |
| EDI | Electronic Data Interchange: The structured computer-to-computer exchange of purchase orders, invoices, shipping notices, and related trading documents across publishing supply chains. |
| EPUB | Electronic Publication: An open standard for reflowable and fixed-layout digital publications, widely used for e-books and designed to support metadata, navigation, multimedia, and accessibility. |
| ERM | Electronic Resource Management: Systems and processes used to manage licenses, access, holdings, renewals, and usage data for journals, databases, e-books, and other subscription resources. |
| ETD | Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Digitally published graduate research outputs distributed through institutional repositories, library platforms, and scholarly discovery services. |
| EXIF | Exchangeable Image File Format: A metadata specification embedded in image files that can record camera settings, timestamps, location, and other information relevant to editorial verification and asset management. |
| F | |
| FAIR | Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable: Principles for managing research data and digital outputs so they can be discovered, accessed under clear conditions, exchanged, and reused effectively. |
| FEP | Federation of European Publishers: A representative organization for European book-publishing associations that engages on copyright, accessibility, taxation, competition, and cultural policy. |
| FOIA | Freedom of Information Act: A term used for laws that provide access to government records, making formal information requests an important reporting and research tool for news publishers. |
| FSC | Forest Stewardship Council: An international certification system for responsibly managed forests and verified material chains, commonly referenced when publishers source paper and printing services. |
| FWCI | Field-Weighted Citation Impact: A bibliometric indicator comparing an output’s citations with the expected citation level for similar publications by field, year, and document type. |
| G | |
| GDPR | General Data Protection Regulation: European Union data-protection law governing how publishers collect, use, secure, retain, and disclose personal data relating to subscribers, contributors, employees, and audiences. |
| GPO | U.S. Government Publishing Office: The federal agency responsible for producing, authenticating, distributing, and preserving official information products for the U.S. government. |
| GSM | Grams per Square Metre: A measure of paper weight used to specify and compare stocks for books, magazines, newspapers, covers, and promotional materials. |
| GTIN | Global Trade Item Number: A standardized identifier for trade items used in retail and supply-chain systems; a 13-digit ISBN is represented as a GTIN-13. |
| H | |
| HTML | Hypertext Markup Language: The standard markup language for structuring web pages and a core format for digital articles, publication platforms, and EPUB content documents. |
| I | |
| IBPA | Independent Book Publishers Association: A U.S. trade association providing education, standards guidance, advocacy, and market programs for independent publishers and author-publishers. |
| ICC | International Color Consortium: An organization maintaining standards for device-independent color management; ICC profiles help publishers achieve consistent color across screens, proofs, and printing presses. |
| ICMJE | International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: A group that publishes widely adopted recommendations on manuscript preparation, authorship, disclosure, trial registration, editorial conduct, and biomedical publication ethics. |
| IDPF | International Digital Publishing Forum: The former standards organization that developed EPUB before its work and membership were transferred to the World Wide Web Consortium. |
| IFLA | International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions: A global library-sector organization whose standards and policy work affect bibliographic control, access, preservation, and publisher-library relationships. |
| IFRRO | International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations: A global network of collective-management organizations that administer text and image reproduction rights and distribute licensing revenue to authors and publishers. |
| IPA | International Publishers Association: A global federation of publishers’ associations that represents the sector on copyright, freedom to publish, literacy, accessibility, and industry policy. |
| IPTC | International Press Telecommunications Council: A standards body for news-media metadata and exchange formats, enabling publishers and agencies to describe, transmit, identify, and manage news content consistently. |
| ISBN | International Standard Book Number: A 13-digit identifier assigned to a specific book edition and format, supporting ordering, cataloging, inventory, sales reporting, and distribution. |
| ISNI | International Standard Name Identifier: A persistent identifier for the public identities of creators, contributors, publishers, and organizations, helping disambiguate names across metadata systems. |
| ISO | International Organization for Standardization: The international standards body responsible for numerous publishing-related specifications, including identifiers, document formats, metadata, quality, and production standards. |
| ISSN | International Standard Serial Number: An eight-digit identifier for serial publications such as journals, magazines, newspapers, and continuing digital resources. |
| ISSN-L | Linking International Standard Serial Number: An identifier that groups the different media versions of a continuing resource, such as its print and online editions. |
| ISTC | International Standard Text Code: An identifier designed to distinguish an underlying textual work from its individual editions and formats, supporting title matching and rights metadata. |
| J | |
| JATS | Journal Article Tag Suite: A NISO XML standard for structuring scholarly journal articles, enabling production, interchange, archiving, accessibility, and delivery across platforms. |
| JIF | Journal Impact Factor: A journal-level citation metric calculated from Web of Science data and used in collection, publishing, and research-assessment decisions, although it does not measure individual article quality. |
| K | |
| KBART | Knowledge Bases and Related Tools: A NISO-recommended practice for exchanging accurate title, package, coverage, and access metadata between content providers and library knowledge bases. |
| L | |
| LCCN | Library of Congress Control Number: A unique identifier assigned to a Library of Congress bibliographic record and commonly included in book metadata and copyright pages. |
| LCP | Licensed Content Protection: An interoperable digital-rights-management technology developed by the Readium Foundation for protecting and lending EPUB and PDF publications. |
| LOCKSS | Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe: A distributed digital-preservation system that allows participating libraries to preserve authorized copies of subscribed scholarly and cultural content. |
| M | |
| MARC | Machine-Readable Cataloging: A family of formats for encoding and exchanging bibliographic records, making accurate publisher metadata important for library cataloging and discovery. |
| MathML | Mathematical Markup Language: An XML-based standard for representing mathematical notation and meaning in web pages, scholarly content, and accessible digital publications. |
| MECA | Manuscript Exchange Common Approach: A NISO standard for transferring manuscripts and associated peer-review and submission data between scholarly publishing systems. |
| METS | Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard: An XML schema for packaging descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata about complex digital objects for exchange and preservation. |
| N | |
| NISO | National Information Standards Organization: A U.S.-based standards organization responsible for many specifications used in scholarly communication, libraries, metadata, identifiers, usage reporting, and digital preservation. |
| NITF | News Industry Text Format: An XML standard maintained by the IPTC for marking up news articles and their metadata for exchange, syndication, archiving, and republishing. |
| NLM | National Library of Medicine: The U.S. biomedical library that operates major literature databases and helped develop structured journal-article formats underlying modern scholarly publishing workflows. |
| O | |
| OA | Open Access: A publishing model that makes scholarly content freely available online, normally with clearly stated reuse rights and without subscription access barriers. |
| OAI | Open Archives Initiative: An organization that develops interoperability standards to improve discovery and exchange of repository and scholarly communication metadata. |
| OAI-PMH | Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting: A protocol that allows services to collect standardized metadata records from repositories, journals, and digital collections for aggregation and discovery. |
| OAIS | Open Archival Information System: A reference model for the long-term preservation of digital information, defining core archival roles, information packages, and lifecycle functions. |
| OASPA | Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association: A membership organization promoting standards, transparency, and sustainable practices among open-access publishers and service providers. |
| OCF | Open Container Format: The EPUB specification component that defines how publication files are organized and packaged within a single container file. |
| OCR | Optical Character Recognition: Technology that converts scanned page images into machine-readable text for search, editing, accessibility, republication, and archive digitization. |
| OER | Open Educational Resources: Teaching, learning, and research materials released under terms that permit free access and varying levels of reuse, adaptation, and redistribution. |
| OJS | Open Journal Systems: Open-source software from the Public Knowledge Project for managing journal submissions, peer review, editorial production, publication, and indexing. |
| ONIX | Online Information Exchange: The international XML-based standard publishers use to communicate book and digital-product metadata to distributors, retailers, libraries, and data providers. |
| ORCID | Open Researcher and Contributor ID: A persistent identifier that distinguishes researchers and connects them with publications, affiliations, grants, peer-review activities, and other contributions. |
| P | |
| PAMCo | Publishers Audience Measurement Company: The UK industry body responsible for cross-platform audience measurement covering participating newspaper and magazine brands. |
| Portable Document Format: A fixed-layout document format widely used for proofs, print files, downloadable publications, scholarly articles, forms, and archival copies. |
|
| PDF/A | Portable Document Format for Archiving: An ISO-standardized PDF profile designed for long-term preservation by constraining features that depend on external resources or proprietary technologies. |
| PDF/X | Portable Document Format for Exchange: A family of ISO-standardized PDF profiles for reliable prepress exchange, with requirements governing fonts, color, page geometry, and print-production data. |
| PEFC | Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification: An international system recognizing national forest-certification schemes and supporting traceable sourcing claims for paper and other forest-based materials. |
| PKP | Public Knowledge Project: A nonprofit research initiative that develops open-source scholarly publishing software, including Open Journal Systems, and supports equitable open publishing infrastructure. |
| PLR | Public Lending Right: A statutory program in participating countries that compensates eligible authors and other rights holders when their books are borrowed from public libraries. |
| PMC | PubMed Central: A free full-text archive of biomedical and life-sciences journal literature operated by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. |
| PMCID | PubMed Central Identifier: The unique reference assigned to an article deposited in PubMed Central and often used to demonstrate compliance with public-access policies. |
| PMID | PubMed Identifier: The unique number assigned to a bibliographic record in PubMed, widely used to identify and link biomedical literature. |
| POD | Print on Demand: A production and fulfillment model in which books are printed in small quantities or as orders are received, reducing inventory and extending title availability. |
| POS | Point of Sale: The retail transaction point where a publication is purchased; aggregated point-of-sale data helps publishers monitor demand, pricing, inventory, and sell-through. |
| PPA | Professional Publishers Association: A UK membership organization representing magazine, specialist, business-to-business, and digital publishing companies. |
| PPI | Pages per Inch: A paper-bulk measure indicating how many pages fit within one inch of a book block, affecting spine width, binding specifications, and shipping weight. |
| PPI | Pixels per Inch: A measure of digital image pixel density used when preparing graphics for screen display and assessing whether source images have adequate print resolution. |
| PREMIS | Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies: A data dictionary for recording the technical, rights, provenance, and event information needed to preserve digital objects over time. |
| R | |
| RDA | Resource Description and Access: A cataloging standard for describing publications and their relationships to works, editions, creators, and formats, influencing metadata supplied to libraries. |
| RGB | Red, Green, and Blue: The additive color model used by screens and digital devices; publishers commonly convert or manage RGB assets when preparing content for print and digital channels. |
| RIP | Raster Image Processor: Hardware or software that converts page-description data into the raster images required by proofers, platesetters, and digital printing devices. |
| ROR | Research Organization Registry: An open registry providing persistent identifiers for research institutions, improving affiliation metadata in submissions, publications, grants, and discovery systems. |
| RRO | Reproduction Rights Organisation: A collective-management organization that licenses copying and reuse of published text and images and distributes revenue to eligible rights holders. |
| RRP | Recommended Retail Price: The price a publisher or supplier recommends for consumer sale, used in title metadata, trade terms, pricing strategy, and market communication. |
| RSS | Really Simple Syndication: An XML-based format that distributes updated headlines, article summaries, podcasts, and publication links to feed readers and other services. |
| S | |
| SAN | Standard Address Number: A U.S. book-industry identifier for organizations and trading locations, used to route orders and other supply-chain transactions accurately. |
| SGML | Standard Generalized Markup Language: An ISO standard for defining structured document markup languages and a predecessor of XML used in longstanding technical and scholarly publishing systems. |
| SICI | Serial Item and Contribution Identifier: A NISO standard for identifying specific issues and articles within serial publications using bibliographic data encoded in a structured string. |
| SIIA | Software & Information Industry Association: A U.S. trade association representing information, data, publishing, education-technology, and software businesses on policy and industry-development issues. |
| SIP | Submission Information Package: In the OAIS preservation model, the content and metadata transferred by a producer to an archive for ingestion and long-term management. |
| SJR | SCImago Journal Rank: A journal metric based on Scopus citation data that weights citations according to the influence of the citing sources. |
| SKOS | Simple Knowledge Organization System: A W3C standard for representing taxonomies, thesauri, classification schemes, and controlled vocabularies in machine-readable form. |
| SLAPP | Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation: Litigation intended to burden or silence public-interest speech, creating significant legal and editorial risk for investigative journalists and news publishers. |
| SNIP | Source Normalized Impact per Paper: A citation metric that adjusts for differences in citation practices across academic fields, enabling more context-sensitive journal comparisons. |
| SRP | Suggested Retail Price: A supplier-recommended consumer price communicated through product metadata and used in trade, retail, and promotional planning. |
| SSP | Society for Scholarly Publishing: A professional association serving publishers, editors, librarians, researchers, vendors, and technologists involved in scholarly communication. |
| STM | Scientific, Technical, and Medical: A major publishing segment encompassing research journals, books, databases, standards, and professional information for scientific and technical communities. |
| SUSHI | Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative: A NISO protocol that automates retrieval of COUNTER usage reports from publisher and content-provider platforms. |
| SVG | Scalable Vector Graphics: An XML-based image format that scales without loss of quality and supports diagrams, illustrations, maps, and accessible graphics in web and EPUB publications. |
| T | |
| TDM | Text and Data Mining: Automated computational analysis of large collections of text and data to identify patterns, relationships, and insights, raising important licensing and platform-access considerations. |
| TEI | Text Encoding Initiative: A community-developed set of XML guidelines for representing the structure and features of literary, linguistic, historical, and scholarly texts. |
| TIFF | Tagged Image File Format: A high-quality raster image format widely used for print production, scanning, preservation masters, and lossless editorial image workflows. |
| V | |
| VoR | Version of Record: The final, formally published version of a scholarly work after editorial processing, typesetting, corrections, and assignment to the publication record. |
| VPAT | Voluntary Product Accessibility Template: A standardized document used by vendors to describe how a digital product conforms to accessibility requirements, often requested in institutional procurement. |
| W | |
| W3C | World Wide Web Consortium: The international standards organization responsible for core web specifications and for maintaining EPUB standards used in digital publishing. |
| WCAG | Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: W3C guidelines for making digital content perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for people with disabilities. |
| WoS | Web of Science: A curated citation-indexing and research-analytics platform used to track scholarly literature, citations, journal coverage, and research performance. |
| WYSIWYG | What You See Is What You Get: An editing interface in which on-screen content closely resembles its final appearance, simplifying page layout and digital-content authoring. |
| X | |
| XHTML | Extensible Hypertext Markup Language: An XML-conforming form of HTML used to structure EPUB content documents and other publishing files requiring consistent machine-readable syntax. |
| XML | Extensible Markup Language: A structured, platform-independent format central to publishing workflows, metadata exchange, multichannel production, content reuse, and long-term preservation. |
| XMP | Extensible Metadata Platform: A standard for embedding descriptive, rights, workflow, and provenance metadata within documents, images, and other digital assets. |