Open Access Publishing Agreements: Elsevier

The Irish Elsevier/ ScienceDirect agreement 2023-2025 was negotiated by representatives from a consortium of Irish universities, institutes of technology and TU Dublin. The agreement allows corresponding authors from member institutions to publish a proportion of articles (an estimated 71%, equating to 230 articles per year in the case of UCD) open access in over two thousand Elsevier journals without any direct publication charges. It also provides continued read-access to the Elsevier’s Freedom Collection of journals for the 19 participating institutions, including UCD. (Source: IReL).

Agreement period:  1 Jan 2023 - 31 Dec 2025.

OA quota per year: 1157 article (shared among participating institutions).

NOTE: APC QUOTA IS FULLY USED UP as of 13th September, 2025. This agreement is now closed for the remainder of the year.

If the allowance is used up, Elsevier’s editorial systems will instead offer corresponding authors the options of:

• Open Access via an Article Processing Charge invoiced to the corresponding author, or
• Traditional no-charge subscription-based publishing, where the article will be available only to subscribing readers.

Note for Authors Submitting Gold (Fully Open Access) Journals:
Please be aware that this Open Access (OA) agreement has limited annual APC quota. This means there is a risk that OA funding may no longer be available by the time the article is accepted for publication.
If funding is no longer available at the point of acceptance, the APC must be covered through alternative sources.
Approval for APC funding under the OA agreement occurs at the time of article acceptance, provided that funds are still available.

Search the Elsevier Journal Finder for this agreement, which provides details of the journals included.

When a paper has been submitted and is subsequently accepted, the corresponding author will be sent an e-mail with a link to an author publication tool. The tool offers several publishing options. If the author selects Gold Open Access as their preferred option, UCD Library will then validate their eligibility, and the article will be published open access on the journal website.

Eligible authors: The corresponding author must be affiliated with a participating institution at the time the article is accepted for publication. The corresponding author must ensure their correct affiliation details are known to the publisher. Requests to publish OA under the agreement are subject to approval by participating members.

Eligible article types: Case reports, Data in Briefs, Full-length articles, Micro-articles, Original software publication, Practice guidelines, Protocols, Review articles, Replication studies, Short communications, Short surveys, Video articles.

OA publishing license: if accepted for publication in the journals included in the Agreement, the corresponding author shall be offered the option of publishing open access under a Creative Commons license (CC BY or CC BY NC ND). Authors shall retain copyright to the journal article.

Availing of the OA agreement on Elsevier's platform: 

For the purpose of eligibility under the agreement, there can only be one corresponding author. The corresponding author is the author who submits the manuscript and other documentation to the journal and is the primary contact between the journal and the co-authors. Importantly, the corresponding author’s affiliation will be used to determine eligibility for the publishing agreement. The affiliations of other co-authors are not relevant for agreement eligibility.

The corresponding author’s responsibilities include:

• Ensuring that all authors have complied with the journal’s policies, including reviewing and approving the final version of the manuscript prior to submission. 
• Distributing and responding to communications from the journal (e.g., decision letters, reviewers’ reports). 
• Completing the post publication author journey including signing the Journal Publishing License Agreement, Rights and Access information form, and selection of open access options on behalf of, and with the agreement of, all co-authors of the paper. 

Journals may follow requests of the team of authors and display other corresponding authors in the published article. Which corresponding authors are displayed on the published paper, however, is not relevant for agreement eligibility.

Joint press release issued by Elsevier and the Irish consortium.
Agreement between Irish higher education institutions and Elsevier.
Elsevier Author Journey - a step by step guide outlining how to publish your article open access upon acceptance.