Open Access Publishing Agreements: Introduction

UCD Library, as a member of the IReL consortium of Irish academic libraries, has entered into a number of Transformative Open Access Publishing agreements with key scholarly publishers. Transformative agreements shift the payments away from subscription-based reading towards open access publishing. They ensure that scholarly research outputs are freely available online to all, with no, or limited, licence restrictions.

These agreements allow UCD corresponding authors to publish an agreed number of Open Access articles in the publishers' academic journals without paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). 

• Taylor &Francis - funding for T&F journals (both Hybrid and Gold) is now fully used up. Authors will not be offered IReL-funded OA until the agreement is renewed in 2024.
• APC allocation for Springer OA agreement is now fully used up for 2023. Between now and the end of 2023, authors will not be offered OA funding under the institutional agreement at the article acceptance date.
• Wiley's fully OA fund is is now fully used up. Hybrid journals allocation is projected to last until the end of the year. 
• IEEE APC allocation is fully used up and agreement closed for 2023.
• Elsevier: the annual quota for 2023 is likely to be exhausted by the end of the year.
• Oxford University Press: limited fund for OUP fully-open access journals has been used up for the remainder of the agreement. For OUP hybrid journals, 2023 allocation has been increased and it is expected to last until the end of 2023.
• Royal Society of Chemistry - OA quota agreement is now fully used up for 2023. Between now and the end of 2023, authors will not be offered OA funding under the institutional agreement at the article acceptance date.

A full list of all the journals included in the IReL agreements can be found here.

Open access publishing agreements can be availed of by all corresponding authors affiliated with UCD at the time the paper is accepted for publication. The corresponding author is the person responsible for manuscript submission and all correspondence/communication during the publication process.

Please ensure you include your UCD address and UCD email address in the corresponding author details at the time of submission.

Please be aware that the length of peer reviewing processes with individual publishers may therefore impact an author’s ability to utilise these OA agreements.  Please contact the relevant publisher for further information. 

If you have any questions in relation to any of the open access publishing agreements detailed on this guide please contact oapublishing@ucd.ie.

For information about open access more generally, please contact Aoife Quinn Hegarty, Scholarly Communications Librarian, UCD Library (aoife.quinnhegarty@ucd.ie) or see our Open Access guide.