Embargo Period

Definition: Applied to Open Scholarship, in academic publishing, the period of time after an article has been published and before it can be made available as Open Access. If an author decides to self-archive their article (e.g., in an Open Access repository) they need to observe any embargo period a publisher might have in place. Embargo periods vary from instantaneous up to 48 months, with 6 and 12 months being common (Laakso & Björk, 2013). Embargo periods may also apply to pre-registrations, materials, and data, when authors decide to only make these available to the public after a certain period of time, for instance upon publication or even later when they have additional publication plans and want to avoid being scooped (Klein et al., 2018).